How to perform a device-wide search on your android device

It is quite unfortunate that iOS users have been able to perform system-wide searches for a while now. Thanks to Spotlight Search feature on iOS. Well you can now do this on your Android device using any of the various apps available for free on the Playstore. With any of these apps, you can perform a system-wide search on your android device for documents, files, contacts, apps and whatnot.

How to Search All Files and Apps on Android

To begin, download this app – Andro Search, from the Playstore as that’s the app we’d be using for this tutorial. Some basic features of this app include:

• Contacts search by name, phone number, email address, notes etc
• File search by name, extension and FullText.
• Ability to view recently modified files and recently installed apps for a quicker search

Now that we know some of its features, let’s move forward on how to use this powerful search tool on your Android device.

• Launch the Andro Search app from your Android device
• After installing the app and running it for the first time, it will start indexing all the files on your device including their metadata – descriptive data about your files – and this can take time depending on how much files, apps etc that you have in your device.

• A search bar comes up, enter the name of the file, contact or app you wish to search for in the search bar
• Tap on the Enter button on your keyboard to begin the search
• Wait for the app to search through your device
• When the search is complete, if the file or app that you searched for is available in your device, you should see it in the screen.

3 Ways to Search Android Phone Using Andro Search App

Note that you can also perform a search using the Andro Search app by three alternative ways

1. By adding it to the notification drawer and launching the search from there. To do this you need to have checked the “Quick Launch Icon” option in the Andro Search settings
2. You can also create a widget for the app and run a search from the widget
3. Or you can replace the Google Now gesture – on your homescreen, swipe from the bottom upwards – with the app.

The Andro Search app is really a wonderful tool that can save you time when you need to locate a file whose location you might have forgotten or do not know at all. I’d appreciate it if you left your thoughts about this tutorial on the comments box below. Ciao