Android App Spotlight #34: ASTRO File Manager

Price: Free ($3.99 for no ads)
Website
AppBrain


This is one of those apps that's so integral to the way I use my phone that I take it for granted. You're probably already familiar with it, but if not, you should be: Astro is a simple and effective way to browse the file structure of your phone and the contents of your SD card without needing to hook your phone up to a computer.

It's pretty much a full-featured file manager, allowing you to rename, edit, and delete any file on your phone, plus the search function has come in handy a couple of times. Most importantly for me, it's been an easy way to install non-Market apk's - just throw them on the SD card and navigate to them through Astro. While typing this, I've discovered that the app even has the ability to backup and restore all of your apps - something for which I've been searching for quite a while. (It's said that if you restore apps through Astro they won't appear in you Market's listing of your installed apps, which would make updates difficult. However, they should show up in your AppBrain list of apps, and if you install new updates via that program, it should get the Market to recognize that you have it installed again.)

Astro is one of those must-have apps back in the day when Android didn't have that many "must-have" apps of which to speak, and it's easy to see why. If you have any desire to tinker around with the guts of your phone, you will need an app like this at some point.