Lucky Shorts

Ignore the name for a second: despite 'Shorts', this is not a drama app or a scrolling feed. Lucky Shorts is a plain, free video player for the files already on your phone — the downloaded, transferred and camera-roll videos that the stock player handles grudgingly.

Format coverage is the reason it exists: MKV, MP4, M4V, AVI, MOV, 3GP, FLV and more, with 4K and Ultra HD playback and hardware acceleration to keep heavy files smooth and stable. It finds your videos by itself, scanning both the device and the SD card, and keeps browsing, management and sharing inside the same minimal interface.

Controls follow the gesture dialect every good player now speaks: swipe on the playback screen to adjust volume, brightness or your position in the video, quick mute when the room changes, playback speed controls for lectures and long talks, and automatic rotation so a landscape file never plays postage-stamp-sized. Multiple playback options round it out for people who like their player configured just so.

It's a tiny, new app (1K+ downloads, rated 4.4 by its early users) and its ambitions are correctly small: play nearly anything, stay out of the way, work the same on a phone or a tablet. If your video folder is a museum of formats your current player refuses, this is the unglamorous fix.