What is your must have open source application available on fdroid?
New pipe - the YouTube front end is absolutely critical for my lifestyle.
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Unciv is a fully-fledged Civilization clone. It’s honestly insane that such a polished game is not only free, but also open source.
- Newpipe (adfree YouTube client)
- Thunder (responsive Lemmy client)
- Geometric Weather (great weather app)
- FBreader (low resource eBook reader)
- KDE connect (sync between phone and laptop)
- Glider (HackerNews app)
- Orgzly (needlessly complex org-mode renderer)
- Skymap (Position-aware constellation viewer)
- Open Camera (impressive photo app)
- PianOli (fun piano app)
- Moonlight (game streaming client)
- WLANScanner (find hidden WiFi camera/devices/networks in hotels)
what’s the org name for Thunder? Searching thunder or lemmy doesn’t get results, search is pretty shit.
thank you
Geometric weather ☁️ is awesome 👍
use breezy weather as geometric isn’t updated anymore
u/tetris11
how does ping work on lemmy?Breezy is better anyhow. I’m pretty blown away by it since finding it a week ago.
And I honestly really liked geometric weather too.
I just downloaded them and they’re pretty darn similar anyways
Yeah no shit. Breezy is just a maintained fork of geometric
of course, but the implication was breezy was substantially better and my point was it seemed pretty much the same
I was thinking using geometric weather but there was an update few days ago. After checking it’s actually “oss weather”, it seems very similar to breezy weather
It seems on FDroid at least that FBreader is no longer available as a FOSS app.
OsmAnd~
Makes navigating around easier especially as someone who likes walking.
Edit because somebody mentioned about the lack of description and link of apps:
OsmAnd~ is a FOSS alternative to Google Maps and uses OpenStreetMap for its data. You can download it here.
Organic Maps for fast FOSS raster maps
This is the überapp, 10 yearsinddevelopmenrt and I’m still fascinated reading the changelog on major releases. Use it almost daily.
I keep trying OpenStreetMaps based mapping apps, but giving up on them because they can never seem to find locations I search for by address.
Yeah I don’t think they’re as accurate and I’m trying to fix it for my local area. For some reason, updates to the map are a bit slow to update.
Termux (Linux terminal) is super cool, and you can install a lot of cools programs through it as well. Add in the plugins for tasker integration/etc and it can be used for some pretty cool things (ie, use wol to wake up your computer when you get close to your house, etc).
Yeah. Termux is really useful to quickly ssh into something without having to go to my pc.
That’s really interesting. Are you using a keyboard and mouse? Or is this like on a Android desktop setup?
By default the app is just a terminal with an on-screen keyboard. Packages installed and run through it are normally terminal only, although there is some amount of support for connecting to a separate app that runs an x server.
There are several other projects that download arm Linux distributions, and install them inside termux to get a full desktop going though. Normally for these you actually interact with the desktop through a VNC client connected to a localhost VNC running on the Linux distro. A VNC client is a good way to handle accessing the desktop since most of them come with a lot of UI design/polish for controlling a desktop computer via a phone screen.
I had no idea Termux was so extensive. Probably better for tablets or DeX-enabled phones?
KISS launcher is the easiest way to avoid Google search.
TrackerControl is the easiest way to just disconnect an app from the internet.
I can’t express my love for KISS launcher enough
+1 for TrackerControl. Love blocking/allowing specific categories/domains for an app. If the app doesn’t need it to do what I want it to do, I block it (looking at you, ads).
There’s so many I could list, I’ll just mention 2 underrated ones I don’t see mentioned as much:
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LibreTube - Best YouTube client imo, has a very nice and modern interface, proxies videos through Piped for maximum privacy (No direct connections to Google are made), No ads/tracking, SponsorBlock + Return YouTube Dislikes, support for downloading videos, etc. It’s everything I’d want and more out of a YouTube client.
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URLCheck - Excellent app that allows you to preview what a URL is before you click it, includes tons of features such as scanning for malware, removing any tracking parameters, upgrading links from HTTP to HTTPS, etc. I can’t recommend this app enough for the security, privacy, and general peace of mind it gives you.
URLCheck is extremely underrated!
It also prevents other apps from knowing what app the URL originated from (by acting as a proxy), and lets you customize the activity flags too
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- AdAway – system-wide ad-blocker, works with and without root, but Adguard DNS work well enough so don’t bother if you can’t root.
- Aegis – clean OTP app
- AntennaPod – best podcast player with lots of customisation
- Breezy Weather (requires IzzyOnDroid repo; fork of the abandoned Geometric Weather) – brilliant, beautiful, ad-free weather app with Accuweather data
- CloudStream (IzzyOnDroid) – 🏴☠️ video streaming from all over the web
- Doodle Live Wallpaper – FOSS recreation of Google’s Pixel wallpapers with some extra customisation
- Frost for Facebook – pretty web wrapper for browsing Facebook
- LibreTorrent – FOSS, ad-free torrenting app
- OsmAnd+ – OpenStreetMap client with navigation, offline maps and loads and loads of customisation
- Antimine – infinite minesweeper game
- Neo Backup – root-based app data backup
- SimpleAppDowngrader – root-based, allows downgrading apps without uninstalling and retains data files
- Tasks.org – best tasklist available, self-hosted but also works with Google Tasks
- ViMusic – free YouTube Music client, works flawlessly and is very pretty
- Wave Lines Live Wallpaper – customisable wave lines live wallpaper
Thanks for this list! Breezy Weather and Tasks.org just made it into my rotation
Syncthing, which syncs my files between my phone and computer. I can rip a music CD on my computer and it’s instantly sent to my phone so I can listen to it on the bus or wherever.
I use Libretube, newpipe x sponsorblock, Liftoff, Aegis, all the Simple apps (Gallery, Draw, File Manager, etc) I use too many
Fennec or Mull for browsers.
Probably KeepassDX, Syncthing and Mull. Newpipe is also a good one, especially since it also supports PeerTube.
Edit: Oh and I forgot about Jerboa.
TLDR:
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NewPipe for YouTube playback
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OsmAnd+ for great offline maps with lots of customisability
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Termux for terminal emulation and ssh
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StreetComplete to easily contribute map data to the OpenStreetMap project, which also powers OsmAnd+ without knowing anything about OSM
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KeePassDX for convenient and secure password storage including autofill (combined with Syncthing for syncing your databases this is a fully fledged password manager across platforms)
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AdAway as a reliable adblocker for all applications which doesn’t require root, but can use the benefits of rooting your device to increase its usefulness even more
+1 for all the NewPipe mentions, as it’s extremely useful especially for background playback
Also OsmAnd+ is incredibly useful if you don’t want to give your location data to Google constantly. The maps are equally as good as those of the tech giants and it gets expanded regularly with actually useful features, like most recently, weather data. Its biggest strength however is the customisability in my opinion, because you can style everything according to your needs, starting at the overlay and the style of the map and going on at the specific level of detail and custom navigation modes. Additionally, you can download maps of the entire world for free and they get updated regularly. Only downside: There is no traffic data as of now, probably because it would be difficult to implement without processing user data. It’s also on the Play Store, but there the “+” version costs money and because the project in itself is commited to being open source I think it’s important to list
Lastly, Termux really is the best terminal emulator for Android out there. It is extremely powerful, even allows sh hooks into system utilities like brightness and biometric login, and has great styling and widget support. You can even install full Linux-OS’s in a sandbox via proot!
edit: add even more great apps
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- Droid-ify (I prefer it to F-droid)
- Immich
- Syncthing
- Paperless Mobile
- WireGuard
- Joplin
- VLC
- Aegis Authenticator
- Obtainium
- Shelter
- Catan Dice Game
Immich seems cool! Its website warms it’s under active development, what do you think of it? What do you think of it compared to other gphotos alternatives?
Until recently, I was using Photoprism. I’d donated via Github a couple of times, as they were promising multi-user capability. They delivered it - behind a paid subscription model. Immich makes it available as is.
I finally took the plunge with Immich a couple of weeks ago, and I love it. I haven’t really experienced any major bugs - the facial recognition is… OK. Not (yet) Google Photos good, but getting there. The machine learning has also done a recent job on object recognition. I can usually search for the main object in my ~15k of photos, and get a small enough set of results that I can reasonably quickly find the exact photo I was looking for.
I’m about to onboard my wife onto it, now that I’m satisfied (and have my backup strategy in place). That will be the next test.
The dev is very active and responsive - I posed a question in the tech support channel on the Immich Discord server, on a weekend, and he responded in about an hour with a couple of suggestions. Colour me impressed - he’ll be getting my next tech donation, for sure.
Keen to see where he plans on taking it - the app definitely needs some additional features to get closer to parity with Google Photos. Auto-sharing of recognised faces would be great (so my wife and I can auto-share pics of our daughter with each other), plus some basic search filters - dates, places, faces all in a single search would be a good place to start.
Thank you for the detailed response!
Oh yes Aegis Authenticator. Its so essential, I forgot. Plus Bitwarden Passwordmanager
We need a way to save comment and posts for personal usage later… Nice list. Yoink.
We have it. There’s a save option
- Organic maps - OpenStreetMap (OSM) client with offline maps
- Street complete - Convenient way to contribute OSM by adding missing information
- Markor - Markdown note taker
- Scrambled exif - Metadata remover from images
- Librera reader - PDF & eBook reader
+1 for StreetComplete. I downloaded from a recommendation on Lemmy and have enjoyed contributing to OSM on my daily walks!
Gotta be AdAway this thing is a must especially for root users
What does AdAway do differently for root users?
AdAway for rooted devices allows you to modify you hosts file directly. This means that AdAway doesn’t have to be constantly running in the background to block ads. It modifies the file then closes.
Looks cool! Can anyone weigh in on how similar this is to DDG’s tracking blocker feature? Is it the same but open source?
Does DDG allow you to import lists? Does it have a VPN-less mode? Can it work system wide?
Its basically just a host file. It pulls in a huge file with all the ad domains and whenever your phone tries to connect to one it gets ignored. Therefore it also works for ads in apps.
It also (usually) manages to hide the space where the ad would be.
I recently switched to AdAway from AdGuard. More ads seem to get through in apps, but combined with unlock in Firefox websites are completely clean.
