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Alan Henry
Craigslist is a great place to buy and sell stuff online, and whether you're hunting for apartments, looking for a great deal, or have something to sell, we think Mokriya is your best bet for using Craiglist on your Android device. It's fast, flexible, looks beautiful, and has all the features you'll need.
Mokriya
Platform: Android
Price: Free
Download Page
Features
Browse all of Craigslist's categories and locations, option to include multiple neighborhoods in searches
Change categories or neighborhoods instantly from the persistent top nav bar, and get instantly updated results
Advanced search tools and filters that let you sort by posts with images, custom apartment or housing needs, prices, and more, with the option to save your search for future reference or to create an alert right away
Create custom searches, and alerts (with push notifications) for those searches so you never miss a fresh listing
"Browse" mode that just lets you see everything in a given category
Pull to refresh listings at any time
Support for posting new Craiglist listings from your phone, taking and including photos, and managing previous posts
Quickly favorite posts and listings for future reference
Advanced filtering tools to sort results lists by date, place, GPS location, or specific flags by category
Quick buttons to email, call, or SMS listing authors right from their listing
Swipe to scroll through photo galleries, with a mini-gallery at the top of each listing
Quick buttons to favorite or share any listing you view
Map-based housing search, so you can view listings on a map instead of by price/location
Beautiful, well spaced, and easily readable interface, even on smaller screens
Where It Excels
We've highlighted Mokriya's benefits in the past, and the app has only improved since we last looked at it. The UI is gorgeous on small and large devices, and while the transitions have that kind of "fade-in" style delay that can feel slow on older devices, they worked well on our test phones and never left us wondering when something was going to load. Switching categories and locations from the top drop-down menu was a snap, and your results refresh instantly as soon as you do. Toggling between recent and lowest price is easy too, and the big photos in the listing view make it easy to decide what to look at more closely and what to skip.
When you do tap a result to take a closer look, the gallery at the top of the view is a nice touch, along with the option to swipe to see more photos. How recent the listing is is listed right there under the photo, and the quick button to view the listing in your browser is at the bottom of the description, right where you figure it would be. Buttons to contact the poster, favorite, and share are nicely placed, and the app doesn't waste screen space with navigation buttons—you can use the back button freely and know exactly what it does.
Search and alerts work the way you would expect them to, but it's also nice to have the option to create alerts with notifications as well as save searches for future reference. Sometimes it's nice to be able to save a search without being notified every time there's a new listing that matches my preferences.
The app used to have a $1 in-app upgrade if you wanted the ability to favorite listings or post new listings, and—at least right now—that fee has been waived so all of the pro features are available in the free download. That's a really nice perk, and while it may mean there's a pro version incoming or another major uplift, it still makes all of our favorite features completely free for everyone—a big move when most of the other Craigslist apps at Google Play are either simple web wrappers with no stand-out features, or holding some of those features back behind in-app premium purchases. Plus, it helps that the developers are extremely responsive, and actively working on the app, squashing bugs and adding new features.
Where It Falls Short
Mokriya is a pretty solid app, but there are a few quirks. In our tests, we caught the app flickering and refreshing several times when we changed categories or switched from "recent" to "low price" every now and again. Nothing serious, but it put us off a little bit, especially when one or two of the refreshes changed the order of the listings. Similarly, we did run into a bug here and there when the app would tell us there were no listings at all in a given category, but when we changed categories and searched for something else, it would return the results we were looking for. It's an odd quirk, but one to keep an eye out for if you download the app. Finally, while Mokriya doesn't waste a ton of space with its own navigation, it's not always super intuitive how to do things like view listings on a map, for example, but that's another minor nit.
The Competition
cPro (Free, In-App Purchases) is probably your next best bet if you don't like Mokriya for whatever reason. It's just as powerful, and while it takes a more no-nonsense, less-design focused approach to its interface, it still gives you the information you need, lets you customize searches and set up alerts and notifications for new listings, packs powerful filters to narrow your search results, and more. It starts you off with a search screen to select your cities (yes, it can search multiple cities at once) and categories, then moves on to your results. You can save searches from the search screen, and even swipe away unwanted listings so you don't see them again. There's a reason it's our favorite pick over on iOS. It's a solid app, and while you'll need to pony up a few bucks via in-app purchase to unlock additional features, it's still a great app and worth trying out.
Craigslist for Android (CLapp) (Free, In-App Purchases) is another solid contender that's much more than a simple web wrapper for Craigslist search results. CLapp also lets you search multiple cities and locations, view your results in a list or a grid, focus on the photos, bookmark favorite posts, and get in touch with posters right through the app. A few people report that app is glitchy, but we didn't run into issues with it. If you have an Android tablet, the app may be especially worth a look, since it has a tablet-optimized version (currently in beta.)
CityShop (Free) is another solid Craigslist app that's a bit more spartan and simple when it comes to design and features, but it's probably the easiest to use of the bunch. Large menus and big buttons make everything easy to navigate, and search results are a simple top-to-bottom scroll. It's a solid app, and we're including it because it's well regarded and we've had good experiences with it in the past, but a number of users are reporting that a recent updated has killed the search feature so only one result displays for every search. It's an app-killing bug, but one we can't imagine won't be fixed shortly—although it has been over a month since the last update.
These aren't the only Craigslist apps at Google Play though—there are several others, but most of them are simple web wrappers for the mobile site, and many of them demand some pretty intrusive permissions for features they don't offer, so we'd recommend you look closely before installing. We caught at least one developer offering two versions of essentially the same app at Google Play just to get out from under bugs and bad reviews, and others that are pretty much custom navigation over top of the mobile site rendered in Chrome, so keep an eye out before downloading.
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