Social

Badoo

Badoo isn't known as the "flirting app" for nothing. Badoo uses your phone's GPS to locate other members in your area, displaying their Badoo profiles, which contain likes, dislikes, and photos. You can use the app to chat with other members and arrange offline meetings Badoo boasts more than 140 million members around the world.

Facebook for Android

Social networks thrive with a reliable app, and Facebook's for Android is solid. The Android app has the quintessential Facebook-branded interface but some unique functionality that's absent in Facebook's iPhone app, such as a side-scrolling preview pane of recently shared photos in the dashboard area.

Gibberbot

Armed with the right software, it's pretty easy for someone to tap into your cell-phone network and read all the text messages and chatting you're doing over your device. Gibberbot obscures all this data so that it looks like "gibberish" to a hacker. This free, open-source chat client offers fully encrypted chatting over Gchat, Facebook, and Jabber. Must be used in conjunction with Orbot, the official Tor client for Android.

Google+

Social networks need mobile apps to thrive, and the Google+ app is a fine start for the platform that arrived in July 2011. The app taps into conventions established by other online social networks, like Facebook and Twitter, while finding some of its own strengths at the same time. Google+ Mobile works fairly well, due to a smart design and comprehensible interface.

Instagram

The most robust photo sharing social network, recently acquired by Facebook for $1 billion, finally came to Android after a two years of iPhone-only love. Instagram for Android lets you put folksy filters on dull photos with a single tap, and quickly share them on Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr.

Tumblr

Tumblr is another popular microblogging platform that lets users quickly share and caption photos, quotes, chats, links, and more. Its app recently received an interface makeover that makes updates even easier.

Vine

Let me be emphatically clear: Vine is not a great app. It is, however, a great service that lets you shoot and share six-second, endlessly looping videos. Six seconds may not seem like much, but Vine can be used to make everything from tiny movies to miniature animations. On Android, its potential is held back by some weird audio issues, and the inability to toggle between the front and rear facing cameras. Once the developers lick these (and other) problems, Vine will be a great app for Android.