Quickly search installed apps, contacts, bookmarks and music by name in Android with Quickdroid

If you use your Android phone or tablet for long periods of time, it must be having tons of apps installed. Both, the home screen and the app drawer, which contains the full list of apps, become cluttered and it becomes difficult to locate the app you want by scrolling through the many pages of the home screen or the app drawer. Here is a nice little free app which can solve this issue. It offers a very fast search for apps, music, contacts, bookmarks and other phone data by typing. It is called Quickdroid and besides being free, its source code is also open.

Although Quickdroid is there on Google Play too, you can also install Quickdroid from the F-Droid repository, the Free Open Source Software (FOSS) alternative to Google Play. F-Droid contains open source apps only which are all free and devoid of ads. F-Droid has its own app store (repository) and a client app whose APK you will have to download to access it. I install many apps using the F-Droid app on each of my Android devices. To install F-Droid, the user has to allow installation from "Unknown sources" in your Android device settings, but it does not require your device to be rooted.

Alternatively, you can directly grab the Quickdroid APK from the following page:
Quickdroid
If you have no interest in using the F-Droid repository to get the Quickdroid search app, you can get it quickly from Google Play. Simply go HERE from your Android browser or search for Quickdroid in the Google Play Store.

Quickdroid will optionally put a small icon in the status bar and show a persistent notification, so it is always easy to access it with one swipe. After you open Quickdroid, simply type the app's name and Quickdroid will instantly find it:

Using Quickdroid's settings, you can define which items it should search. For instance, you can prevent Contacts, Songs, Albums from being searched and keep only Apps:

For those who do not want the status bar icon, it is possible to disable it.

You can also show pictures for Contacts if you have added them via the Contacts app. It has a couple of other useful settings too such as customizing how many results to show per category (apps, contacts, bookmarks etc) and how to do the pattern matching. You can also clear the search history, configure the Back key to quickly exit the app, and change other options related to speech, gestures, keyboard etc.

Depending on how frequently you launch an app by searching, QuickDroid refines its search so the most used apps will rise to the top in search results. If you tap and hold the app's name in the search results, you will be able to put its shortcut icon on the Home screen.

QuickDroid is one of the must-have apps for me and for people who value productivity. It is a bit strange that the Android OS does not have such simple functionality out of the box. The Google Search app is there and although it returns apps and contacts in search results, it prioritizes web search over local device search.