Just getting started with my new Android — a Samsung Galaxy Core Prime — and have no idea how to find the app store, find apps, and get them on my smartphone. Help!
At this point in the evolution of smartphone systems, I’m convinced that the developers have completely forgotten what the experience is like for someone who doesn’t actually live and breath this stuff. You’re by no means the first person to be stymied upon looking at the opening screen of their modern tech, be it a “smart” TV, a cell phone, a tablet or a computer. Nothing as easy as a button on the home screen labeled “Get More Apps!” because that would take the mystery out of things. 🙂
Android is nonetheless pretty easy to use once you get the hang of it. The biggest thing to realize is that the icon-filled screens you see on your Samsung device are only those apps that Samsung or you have added to those screens, and not an exhaustive list of every single app installed on your device. This constantly baffles me, and even Windows 10 does the same thing, where you can install a program and then have to hunt to find it. Weird.
But let’s get back to Android. I assume you’re running “Lollipop”, the latest shipping version of Android (you might hear about “Marshmallow” but that’s not quite out yet).
Let’s start at the home screen, because this is probably very close to what you have:
Note that I sometimes shrink images down so they fit here on the page!
What you don’t see on this screen is the App Store for Android. It’s hidden on the “every app and program on this device” area, which you access by tapping on the button with the six tiny boxes, three up, three down. Tap on it to reveal that there’s more on your phone than just those eight apps on the home screen:
Lots more. But see the two dots on the bottom of the screen? The bigger one is your current location and the smaller one indicates that there’s even another screen with yet more apps and programs “to the right”. So swipe right-to-left to bring it on screen…
There’s the program you want. The “App Store for Android” is actually known, rather confusingly, as the Play Store. Find and launch it by tapping on the icon.
If you’ve never launched it before, the first step will be for you to sign in to your Google account or set one up:
Once you’ve done that, you can get into the Google Play store and see what apps, programs, games and utilities are hot.
The main screen looks like this — though not exactly like this because what’s being promoted changes every day:
Even here, though, it’s not easy to figure out how to search for a specific program or application, is it?
Turns out that the box on the top that says “Google play” is actually a search box!
Tap on it and type in the name of the program you seek. I’ll get a copy of Facebook for Android by tapping in facebook:
As you type, autocomplete offers possibilities from other searches, so as soon as you see a good match, stop tapping in letters and simply tap on the matching entry!
In this case, I saw “facebook” come up after only tapping in 3-4 letters total.
The next screen is the detailed information for the specified search. If it’s a single app, that’s even easier:
You can see that it’s a fairly popular app with over 1 billion downloads. Impressive!
Learn more about an app by tapping on “Read More”, or just jump in headfirst and download it! To do that, tap on “Install“, the green button.
Just about all apps then require some level of permission from the system to access data, and Facebook wants it all, as highlighted:
You can drill in and learn more about specific permissions, but let’s keep moving forward by tapping “Accept“…
Now it downloads:
Then once it’s downloaded installs:
and finally, once it’s installed the buttons change:
Ready to go with your shiny new, freshly downloaded and installed Android app? Tap on “Open”:
That’s it. Facebook downloaded, installed and running!
Done. Right?
Well, no. Because once you quit the app you’ll be unable to find it again on most Android devices unless you go to the All Apps area, which is a bit frustrating. To circumvent that, let’s add it to the home screen.
Once you find the app on the all apps screen, it actually is easy to add it to your home screen. Just tap and hold your finger on the app icon. After a moment or two you’ll see grey squares that represent the different home screens: just drag the app icon to the correct screen and place on the screen, as I’m doing below:
That’s it. Now the Facebook app icon will be right on my home screen on the Android device. Not too bad, but super frustrating if you don’t know to do this last step.
Hope that gets you started with your Android device. Enjoy!
I try to get an app as you outlined, but (in my older phone, which no longer has any SIMs) when I launch Play Store, I get a gray screen with “Loading,” then buzz, then buzz buzz, then “The application Google Play Store (process com.android.vending) has stopped unexpectedly. Please try again.” That’s after I did a factory reset. The phone knows about my Google account, and I can install apps on the phone from Play Store on my computer, but Play Store won’t load on the phone.
I try to get app as you outlined , I keep getting a message that says”Your device isn’t compatible with this version
What version of Android are you running, Eugene? Google Play shouldn’t be showing you incompatible apps…