There is a free version and a surprisingly affordable pro version but what does it do and, well, is it worth getting?
Sidebar pops open a customisable sidebar menu on the left or right side of your Androids screen. This menu hides until you choose to open it with a quick swipe.
It shows icons for your favourite applications, and for those already open, as well as an additional menu of toggles (for example the ever useful torch), so you can easily switch between apps with a quick swipe rather than have to dig through your app drawer or search through your home screens, making this a very handy utility.
The screenshots shown here are not what you will see if you use the default settings, they show the sidebar after the opacity and colour have been changed (this can be done in the pro version) and with apps added to the menu, but that is the beauty of Sidebar, you can make it look the way you want it to.
Effect on battery life is minimal, certainly not enough to be a concern, though if you have a very limited amount of ram be aware that Sidebar uses around 22 megabytes and runs three services (for app selection, swipe detection and displaying the actual sidebar itself).
This shouldn't be a problem unless you have a very low memory device and is less than many launchers use, so if you have a few hundred megabytes or more ram on your phone (or tablet) this is one app that may warrant your attention.
Some devices, such as The Samsung Galaxy S4, will need the sensitivity set to high - this can easily be done in the apps preferences menu, which can be accessed by running the application at any time, if you find you can't get the sidebar to show make sure to set the sensitivity to high.
Sidebar is a brilliantly simple utility, you are only ever a quick swipe away from running any app you choose, or switching from one app to another, and the toggles for wifi, torch, etcetera make it even more useful.
Yes Sidebar is one of those apps that quickly makes you wonder just how you got along without it, it makes app selection and task switching absurdly easy and does so while consuming very little system resources.
The app is developed by Mohammed Adib, developer of the popular Roundr app and, as you might expect if you've used said application, functions smoothly with regular updates that add new features or fix any bugs found, so if you want a sidebar app that will continue to be supported into the forseeable future this is one worth considering.
