If you have more than one app installed on your Android smartphone that support opening of a file type, then Android shows you a prompt to select any of them or choose a default from them when you try to open that file type. For example, Android KitKat can open image files with the Android Gallery app and the Google Photos app. When you try to open a JPEG image file, it shows you a prompt to choose any of them or select any of them as the default app. While this way of giving options to the user is efficient enough in itself, you can add much more flexibility and choice of apps using the free Better Open With app for Android.
Better Open With allows you to choose a preferred app for all the different file types – audio files, audio stream, browser files, image files, PDF documents, video files, video streams etc. You can choose one preferred app for any of these file types in addition to choosing a countdown timer for selecting the preferred app automatically.
Next time, you try to open a file type, you have to select Better Open With from the list and set it to be used Always. This will make Android use Better Open With each time you open that file type – which in turn will give you its own prompt to select any of the apps that can open that type of files. The difference between Android’s own app selection prompt and Better Open With is that the latter has a countdown timer which selects the preferred app automatically after a few seconds.
If at any later time, you decide to turn off Better Open With for any of the file types, then you can open Better Open With, choose a file type and then toggle the On-Off switch on the top to the OFF state. In the settings for Better Open With, you can choose the default countdown timer, a layout for the app selection prompt (either list or grid layout), whether to show icons or the text too for each of the apps in the selection prompt and more.
Conclusion: The Better Open With app can add more flexibility and ease for choosing the right app for opening a file type in Android. The countdown timer feature is also very useful if you do not want to wait for making a selection yourself. You can even disable the timer for any file type to use the preferred apps directly without any selection prompt or waiting.
You can get the Better Open With app for Android from https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.aboutmycode.betteropenwith.