These are the top Android apps and games of 2013, in terms of user recognition. This year, Google inaugurated the Play Store's annual Players' Choice awards, and received more than a million votes.
So, there you have it! Android users from across the world, have chosen what they felt was their best app. Here are the titles that took first place in their respective categories
Knights & Dragons is a free-to-play action RPG that has quickly rocketed to popularity in 2013. Players can go on 'epic quests' and 'adventures' in a fantasy realm, battle beasts and other players, form guilds and take on others, and compete in weekly tournaments
Bejeweled Blitz is one of the most popular mobile puzzle games in the world. Players have to match and detonate as many gems as they can in 1 minute, and can then compare scores with their Facebook contacts, or place a high score on the weekly leaderboards
The Hobbit: Kingdoms of Middle-earth is another free-to-play massively multiplayer action RPG, players can choose between two races - dwarves and elves – and join players from across the world, each building a city and destroying goblins to save Middle-earth. As leaders, players can also forge alliances, conquer territories, and participate in tournaments
Duolingo: Learn Languages Free is a language teaching app that can give users interactive lessons in Spanish, German, French, Portuguese, Italian, and English, from basic to advanced. The developer calls it a ‘college-quality education without the price tag'
YouTube is the world's most popular video-sharing network, and there is no doubt as to its wide-ranging appeal and use. The new versions introduced this year have had several new features, including background playing videos via picture-in-picture, a revamped comment interface, improved touch interface, and more
Ingress is an innovative augmented reality-based strategy game, "transforming the real world into the landscape for a global game of mystery, intrigue, and competition," with players collecting and discovering virtual object in the real world to help one of the two factions - the Enlightened or the Resistance
Samurai Siege is a multiplayer real-time combat strategy game, where players turn their village into a stronghold, apart from building and leading armies of samurai, ninjas, and 'fantastic monsters of the East.' Players can fight each other, or team up to form a clan or alliance. Alliance Wars will allow alliance groups to fight against each other
NewsHog: Google News & Weather is an innovative free news aggregator, which claims to be the most comprehensive and feature-rich such app on Google Play. Aggregating via Google News, NewsHog gives users news on any topic or location. It also has features such as summarization, reader mode, text to speech and offline reading. More than a 100 preset channels are present
SwiftKey Keyboard is the only paid app on the list of apps that won the 2013 user choice awards. Calling itself a mind-reading keyboard, it claims to provide the world's most accurate autocorrect and next-word prediction in 60 languages. Intelligently learning as you type (or by scanning your mail account or blog), it also shares its knowledge across all your compatible devices, via SwiftKey Cloud