Been using a degoogled LineageOS phone with all apps being exclusively FLOSS. My favourite free alternatives to proprietary apps and services must be Lemmy (Jerboa) for Reddit, ArcaneChat and Matrix (Extera) for Telegram, Fluxer for Discord.
Which ones are your favourite?
OpenCamera
If there’s better or similar, please advise me as I’m always interested in discovering
My main ones right now are OSMAnd + BRouter for maps, Spotube + ListenBrainz for music, Etar and Tasks.org + DAVx5 for calendar/tasks, Cheogram for texts/calls, Bitwarden for passwords/passkeys, F-Droid for downloading apps.
Comaps instead of gmaps, mastodon instead of X, bitwarden
- Heliboard
- Aves for gallery, Immich for backup/web viewing
- antennapod for podcasts
- aegis for TOTP
- bitwarden for passwords
- Gitnex for codeberg
- auxio for local music
- fennec for browser
- findroid for jellyfin
- inaturalist for plant and animal recognition (only play store but FOSS)
- liftlog for lifting (only play store but FOSS)
- local send for file transfer
- Openvitals for health data aggregation from health connect (buggy slop app, but it is the best of the, apparently only slop, apps available and gadgetbridge doesn’t use phone pedometer and only writes to health connect so can’t be used for aggregated data)
- Supertonic TTS ( used to be marmalade TTS, better voices, but their last update, also a slop app, made the voice synthesis using the android unusably staticy)
- Thunderbird for email
- Signal for messaging
- Fairscan for scanning (also checking out openscan and OS’S document scanner but they seem unusably slow, like 5-10s for one scan)
- Curbox for digital wellbeing (timers, intent, and habit breaking “boops” for apps.
- games: shattered pixel dungeon, mindustry, and Huesort
- whisper+ for STT
inaturalist for plant and animal recognition (only play store but FOSS)
sadly, inaturalist needs boogle play services
did you try ironfox ?
Ironfox broke too many websites for me personally. I understand the reason is that it uses heavy anti-data collection and privacy settings, but it was a little overkill for daily browsing. I ended up settling on Fennec too.
for those who think of trying ironfox
there are “protection overrides” under settings > ironfox settings, to help with site breakages
LibreCuts for video editing Droid-ify as a lightweight F-Droid client Iris Keyboard as a lightweight yet extremely customizable keyboard Pur.ili as a search engine with its own index OpenNavBar for a fully-customizable navigation bar Fossify File Manager for managing files Prism Gallery for viewing photos and videos Lune as an offline music player Pocket Paint for photo editing and paint CoMaps for navigation GeoLibre as an altermative to Google Earth Yagni Launcher as an Android launcher Pimi Widget for weather widget Offline Translator for translating and OCR
Wow, I didn’t know of many of those. Thanks! A FOSS search engine with its own actual index is especially intriguing.
Oh wait, sorry. Pur.ili doesn’t have a source code. Sorry. Use Mojeek or Marginalia instead
How is purili FOSS? I see no links to any source code on their site. It actually seems like someone’s vibe coded solo project, based on the blog posts.
Okay, taking my words back. I just assumed everything people recommend here is FOSS because that’s what I asked for. If it is proprietary and even vibe-coded, I’m not interested.
Really? You do not even know Fossify? They got a whole suote of apps! Not just file manager, and they are the most famous FOSS Android app suite beside Proton
I didn’t say everything from your post was new to me. Fossify I do know and their apps look pretty decent although somewhat barebone. I usually need more features so I ended up using other FOSS apps.
If you want a more advanced file manager, try Material Files. They’ve been revived now. If not, then maybe Amaze File Manager. If you really wanna go crazy, WM Keyboard has a built-in file manager aswell
Thanks! Material Files is the one I use most of the time. I also have
Prism File Explorer +installed, but it’s vibe-coded so I try to use as little as possible
FUTO Keyboard I mainly use swipe typing, and it works better for me, than google keyboard.
FUTO keyboard? I can’t find it on fdroid
You need to add the futo repo to fdroid https://f-droid.org/tutorials/add-repo/
Thanks! I really like swipe typing I just couldn’t find one good enough Ps: I’m liking what I’m seeing
I’ve had a worse experience with their swiping which is annoying because in general i like that keyboard way more
Fossify and LibreOffice
LibreOffice? For Android?
libreoffice viewer maybe?
https://f-droid.org/packages/org.documentfoundation.libreoffice/Good catch! I kind of missed this detail. ☺️🤭
Unexpected Keyboard and Thumb Key for two-hand and single-hand typing respectively.
Qalculate! for calc.
Thumb Key is my favourite! Using it right now. Very interesting to see its idea of using swipes to type additional characters implemented in traditional qwerty layout. Thumb Key isn’t the best for terminal, so it might be a good compromise.
i liked thumb key a lot and switched to flickboard so that i could type one- and two-handed with the same keyboard for each thumb. you can even choose the thumb-key layout, and give it a custom background
Interesting. But from reading the description I don’t see any advantages over Thumb Key because the latter also has two-handed layouts that can be seen in screenshots of Flickerboard. What do you find better in Flickerbourd that in Thumb Key?
i didn’t know TK had 2H layouts when i installed it years ago. i think they both have a lot of overlap in being feature-rich, with main differences (imo) being:
Thumb Key
- has more 1H and 2H layouts, variations of layouts, and languages
- is a tiny bit more responsive with fewer mistypes for my thumbs, but YMMV
- can be further modified with YAML, which i haven’t tried
Flickboard
- uses long-press for 0-9, instead of a separate pad or dedicated flick gestures, which i find more intuitive
- can upload images for keyboard backgrounds
i think Thumb Key has a higher ceiling if you’re that kind of power user, but Flickboard has like 90% of the same goodness with an important extra little bit of flair
The two-handed typing you’re referring to, that’s 2x thumb layouts right? Not QWERTY.
correct, 2x thumb layouts!
Got it. Makes sense. I’ve used Thumb Key with 2x thumb layout so I got a bit confused. Tried flickboard, seems nice, very similar to TK indeed.
