Just setup a new de-Googled phone and figured I’d share some of the good FOSS apps I’m using. Please feel free to chime in with any you’d recommend (or better options than what I have listed)
- Weather: Breezy Weather. Note that the version in F-Droid is the “freenet” version and only has one source (Open-Meteo I believe). The “standard” release is available on Github and has additional sources like AccuWeather, OpenWeather, etc. Absolutely gorgeous app as well as widgets.
- Maps: Organic Maps What Google Maps should be. Absolutely gorgeous, functional, and works 100% offline.
- Google Play Store: Aurora Store. Sometimes you need an app that’s only available in the official Play store. Aurora store lets you download apps without having Play services installed or requiring a Google account. Even if you do have Play services and Play store available, Aurora is just so much more usable since it’s not a flaming dumpster fire of “suggestions”, “recommendations”, and ads.
- Email: K-9 Mail. Basically Thunderbird Mobile. Enough said.
- Calendar: Etar Fast and efficient, syncs easily with my DAVx5 synced calendars from Nextcloud
- Tasks: OpenTasks. Create, edit, update, and complete tasks. Can sync to a CalDAV server via DAVx5.
- Contact/Calendar/Task Sync: DavX5 WebDAV sync utility that I use to sync my calendar, contacts, and tasks from Nextcloud to my phone.
- Matrix: SchildiChat. So much better than Element for Android. Was having constant issues with encryption keys failing to sync in Element that hasn’t (yet?) been a problem with SchildiChat.
- Launcher: FastDraw: This is more of a preference, but I really like this launcher for its simplicity and ease of organization. Don’t recommend this if you use a lot of widgets as it only supports one at a time (feature, not bug).
- Authenticator: Aegis
- SIP/VOIP: Linphone I really wish the desktop version of Linphone had this kind of polish.
- MPD Client: M.A.L.P Absolutely gorgeous and intuitive MPD client. I pair it with Snapcast to control my whole-house audio.
- Quick Share: Snapdrop/Pairdrop I don’t use the app (rather, I have my self-hosted one pinned as a PWA), but this is great for sending one-off files or text between devices.
- Music: Tie between Apollo and Mucke. The default LineageOS (AOSP?) music player is nice, but the phone I setup wasn’t supported with LineageOS and didn’t have a good music player included. Additionally, those two scale well on the small screen of the device I’m using where others would crop off the controls at varying points.
- Web Apps: NativeAlpha. Uses the Android System WebView to wrap any website into a standalone “app”. While most mobile browsers will let you do that with the “Add to home screen” button, only ones with a
manifest.jsonwill work as apps; the rest are just shortcuts. Also includes other niceties such as adding adblock, controlling cookies, defaulting to a desktop version, and modifying the user agent string (among other options).
For music, assuming it’s local playback of files, I go with auxio because I’ve given up on finding an open source music app for android that has the ability to make live lists instead of just normal playlists.
K-9 Mail is pretty decent from my use of it. Definitely better than the default gmail, which I can only disable data/internet access to because fuck being able to uninstall unessential apps, am I right?
Also, just looked up what an MPD is because I’m an idiot, but I might have to look into this.