Sun 24 November 2024

In Part IV, I discussed wristwatches. In this article, I'm jumping back into my pocket, so to speak, with a look at what's on my phone itself.

This was a rather exhausting article to write, because I have a lot of apps on my phone. I have even been ridiculed for it, but whatevs. ;)

For almost every app, I will provide a source link, the kind of app license (FOSS, Source-Available, or Proprietary) and a brief-ish description.

Home Screens

• KISS Launcher (FOSS): This launcher is both really basic, and really powerful. It's the best launcher if you really love your wallpaper, because it can either not show anything above the wallpaper at all, or optionally show a single row of icons at the bottom, and/or a single column of widgets. It's also extensively search-based, and does a fantastic job at findings apps by name or name-fragment, as well as contacts and app activities (such as opening a new window in your browser). What it lacks in the ability to manually organize lots of icons, it makes up for in the ability to tag/categorize apps, powerful search, and the ability to present apps based on frequency and/or recency used.
• AOSP/Pixel Launcher (FOSS): The stock launcher in CalyxOS, GrapheneOS, and (I guess) LineageOS is quite good and usable, even though it hasn't changed a whole lot in a lot of years

Keyboards

• Heliboard (FOSS): This is the best FOSS keyboard I've found so far. It is feature-rich, stable, and is still being maintained, from what I can tell. If you pair it with Sayboard, you even get voice dictation (FOSS and offline).
• FUTO Keyboard (Source-Available). FUTO Keyboard is a very polished keyboard app with a source-available license. That means that while the source code is free to view and inspect, there are limitations on how it can be used. This does not qualify as a FOSS license by either the OSI's or the FSF's definition, but the basic freedoms of the end-user is respected (the restrictions are only on "Freedom 3"). FUTO Keyboard also comes with an excellent dictation app, but it is unfortunately not offline (meaning that your voice recording is sent to someone's server for recognition).
• GBoard (Proprietary, beware): I've resigned myself to going back to GBoard, for now. Even though it is horribly proprietary and not at all to be trusted, it simply has the best typing experience by far. It has a lot of intelligence and adapts very well to my typing. I run it fully firewalled from the internet, and I wouldn't recommend having it on your phone at all, unless your Android OS enables you to do the same.

Image Gallery/editor

• Fossify Gallery (FOSS): This is a very good basic gallery and very basic image editor. It's my default gallery, and my first pick for very basic image editing like crops or markup (although I find I have to use the system magnifier to do a lot of the markup, as it doesn't have any way of zooming in on a portion of the image when in markup/pen mode). Also, the marks are completely opaque, so it's suitable for redaction.
• Image Toolbox (FOSS): This is an amazing, full-featured image editor. It has extensive filters, free-rotate, brightness/contrast/HDR-style adjustments, markup, image conversion (including Lossy PNG!!!), and basically, the kitchen sink. I almost never have to use Snapseed now that I discovered this one. It's not a gallery, though, just a viewer.
• Aves Libre (FOSS): This is a very full-featured image gallery (not editor). It has extensive metadata support, and even a map mode. It's the bees knees.
• Snapseed (Proprietary). This is another "warning, don't even install this unless your Android build lets you completely block network access from an app" Google app. I use it only quite rarely, because there's very little that Image Toolbox can't do.
• ImagePipe (FOSS): This is a very basic utility to automatically reduce the size of images and strip the EXIF tags when you share an image to it from another app. I use it whenever I share to the fediverse, except on PixelFed (where I share full-size images).
• Scrambled Exif (FOSS): Similar to ImagePipe, but a simpler tool just for stripping EXIF information. I use it when sharing to PixelFed or instant messaging platforms where I want to share the full-quality image.

SMS

• See this post for SMS/MMS options (they're not great)

(Internet) Messaging

• Element or FluffyChat (both FOSS): These are both very capable Matrix clients. I'm happy with Element, but I recommended FluffyChat to a fedifriend that wasn't happy with Element, and he rather liked it.
• Signal (FOSS): I don't love Signal because of the dearth of good native clients for the desktop. but the mobile client is fine. It's probably the closest you'll get to talking to friends and family on a platform that isn't an absolute garbage fire, so there you go. ;)
• DeltaChat (FOSS): I don't actually use this, but it comes highly recommended. It's an email client structured to act like a chat/messaging client. It's a genius idea, and I may switch to it in the future when I finally get sick of SMS (since RCS is likely never coming to FOSS phones, because Google is horrible).
• K-9 Mail / Thunderbird (FOSS): I've been using K-9 mail for three years now, and while I don't particularly enjoy checking my mail on my phone, it definitely gets the job done. The new Thunderbird for Android is based on K-9, and both are being updated and maintained in parallel for now, but K-9 will turn into Thunderbird in the near future.
• Beeper (FOSS): I have it, but I don't use it. I like the idea, though: one messaging app to rule them all. It's worth looking into.
• MarcoPolo (Proprietary): I use it occasionally to video message a couple friends and family. I recommend you stay away from it.

Bible Study

• AndBible: Bible Study (FOSS): This is a very good and fully-featured bible reading and research application. Like most FOSS Bible study apps, it lacks a lot of the cool, hip new translations, but it has the NASB, which is pretty fly.
• Blue Letter Bible (Proprietary): This is my go-to app for lexical research (a.k.a., "looking it up in the 'Strong's'"). It has a couple more modern translations than AndBible, as well.
• YouVersion / "The Bible App" (Proprietary): This is the most extensive "free" (as in beer) bible app out there. It has tons of translations in tons of languages, and free bible audiobooks. It is, unfortunately, also a thermonuclear death stew of trackers and garbage. I run it with background battery and network access denied, in a Work Profile, and through the DuckDuckGo browser's tracker protection VPN. I mainly use it for one or two translations I can't get elsewhere, and for the amazing Streetlights audio bible (dramatic reading by African-American voices), but the level of spyware on this Bible app is shameful. I even submitted a trouble ticket over the trackers, but got a nonsensical boilerplate corporatespeak response.

Maps/Navigation

• GMaps WV (FOSS front-end): This is just a restricted, dedicated webview to the Google Maps website. I use it to look up points of interest, business open hours, and occasionally directions when traffic is an issue. It does not provide navigation, but you can look up anything on google maps and get basic directions.
• Organic Maps (FOSS): This is a good FOSS navigation app using OpenStreetMaps as its source data. It's good for in-city driving, but I don't trust it on highways as it doesn't have sufficiently precise offramp guidance. It's very easy to get lost on Dallas "MixMasters" using this app. It's still my default navigation app 90% of the time, though.
• MagicEarth (Proprietary): This proprietary maps and navigation app is my go-to for highway driving, or places where OSM doesn't have a precise location, as it's able to guess a point's location by interpolating between known points. In other words, if you're going to 1050 Main Street, and OSM only has 1000 and 1100 Main Street, MagicEarth will take you to a point equidistant between those two. It also provides very helpful guidance when looking for the correct off-ramp on the highway. It's not FOSS, but the company confesses to be privacy-respecting, and their product is the map itself (providing mapping resources to companies), so they're less motivated to steal/sell customer information. Caveat Emptor, though, as always, when dealing with proprietary software.
• GPSLogger (FOSS): This is an excellent and efficient GPS logging app. You can use it for logging coordinates for later adding geolocation to photos taken wth a dSLR, or for travel logging, or whatever. It supports a variety of export formats (GPS, KML, and CSV, from my memory) and logging intervals, and absolutely sips battery, even when logging frequently all day long.
• Google Maps (Proprietary): use any Google app with extreme caution. I have it isolated in a work profile, with background GPS, battery, and data privileges revoked, and not logged in. I also manually kill the app from the settings popup whenever I'm done using it. I only quite rarely use it for navigation, and mainly use it every once in a while for looking up POI details that aren't convenient or available on Gmaps WV.

Music/Media

• AntennaPod (FOSS): Only the very best podcast program I've ever used. I haven't been tempted to try a proprietary podcast app once since trying AntennaPod. That's really saying something.
• NewPipe (FOSS): This is the best Peertube and Youtube client I've used on Android. Do look into getting the version/fork that has SponsorBlock built-in. It's nice.
• PipePipe (FOSS): A fork of NewPipe that emphasises YouTube and a few other proprietary video hosting services. I use both apps so I can focus on PeerTube with NewPipe and Youtube with PipePipe. Otherwise, they're not terribly different.
• mpv-android (FOSS): The best (IMHO) media player for the desktop is also a very capable (and equally minimalistic) media player for Android.
• Auxio (FOSS): A very solid music player for Android, with a very sane and easy-to-read/navigate UI.
• Vanilla Music (FOSS): A very full-featured music player. I used it for many years until I recently switched to Auxio. They're both very good, and Vanilla Music has a lot of nice plug-ins.
• RiMusic (FOSS): A very nice Youtube Music client for Android, and it is updated frequently. A scruffy-looking gentleman with a wooden prosthetic leg and eye patch just said something like "ARE!" to me, but I have no idea what that's all about.
• InnerTune (FOSS): Another nice YT Music player, which also has the option to let you log in to your YT Music account. Has a little more legible UI design than RiMusic, but wasn't working properly the last time I tried it. It does get updated, though, and will probably be working again in the near future, if it isn't working already.
• Audire (FOSS): Excellent FOSS music recognition app. I believe it uses Shazam as the backend, but the client itself is FOSS.
• Romote (FOSS): This is a straightforward FOSS remote control for Roku devices and TVs. Very nice to have.
• YouAmp (FOSS): Client for subsonic/gonic servers. Haven't used it for a long, but it seems to work very nicely.
• RadioDroid (FOSS): Excellent app for listening to free internet radio streams. This is also a recent discovery.
• FFShare (FOSS): Lets you convert videos using ffmpeg on your phone
• Noice (FOSS): Nice noise generator app. Has a lot of different sound tracks available that you can mix together to help you focus or sleep.
• Pano Scrobbler (FOSS): Excellent scrobbler app that lets you scrobble to a number of different services, or simply to a local CSV file (my preferred option!)

App Stores

• F-Droid (FOSS): The OG. The Definite Article, you might say (with apologies to Tom Baker). I use F-Droid with pretty much stock settings to find and update FOSS apps for android. I don't add any repos to F-Droid, because I want to know that the apps I find in F-Droid proper are fully FOSS and reproducible builds, not just something downloaded from GitHub.
• Droid-ify (FOSS): This is an alternate F-Droid client with slightly better search. It also makes it easy to add a lot of optional repos like IzzyOnDroid and DivestOS. I look on Droid-ify when I can't find it on F-Droid. The apps on IzzyOnDroid and other repos are likely all still FOSS, but they haven't gone through the same independent build process that the apps on the F-Droid repo proper do. This means that you can sometimes get a needed update (such as to get a newer version of NewPipe that works around google's attempts to block it) sooner, although making the small sacrifice of safety because it wasn't independently built by F-Droid.
• Aurora Store (FOSS, but full of proprietary apps): This is a FOSS app that lets you download apps from the Google Play store without running Google Play on your phone. But do beware that almost all apps on Google Play are proprietary, and likely hazardous to your privacy and digital agency.
• MicroG (FOSS): This isn't an app that you install on your phone in most cases, but rather an app that's available from several different FOSS Android OSes, such as CalyxOS, and some builds of LineageOS. MicroG isn't an app store, either, but a service that allows you to run most apps that require Google Play Services successfully, without running any actual Google code on your device. It's a good thing.

Social

• Tusky (FOSS): My favorite Fediverse client, works with a number of fediverse servers (Mastodon and GoToSocial, in my testing), but not so well with PixelFed in my recent testing. Lightweight, well-designed, and enjoyable to use
• PixelDroid (FOSS): This is a dedicated FOSS client for PixelFed. It works fairly well.
• FediLab (FOSS): This is The Kitchen Sink of fediverse clients. It even works well with PixelFed. I used to daily drive it, but I find I now prefer Tusky, even though Fedilab's feature set is really impressive.
• SlimSocial for Facebook (FOSS): Facebook is horrible. I use this app about once every three months. It's the second best way to access facebook on your phone. The best way? Don't.

Sync/"Cloud"

• SMS Import / Export (FOSS): This has replaced a proprietary utility I used for many years to back up my SMS and MMS messages, although it never seems to start automatically (nightly) for me.
• DAVx5 (FOSS): Excellent CalDAV/CardDAV client for syncing your contacts and calendar.
• Etar (FOSS): A FOSS calendar, since AOSP doesn't seem to have (a working) one (anymore). I use the CalyxOS calendar, which is a light fork of Etar.
• Round Sync (FOSS): This is a fork of RCX, which is a build of rclone for Android. It lets you access nearly any cloud service provider imaginable on your phone. (Very slowly)
• Syncthing-Fork (FOSS): The best syncthing client for Android. This one app is itself one of the best arguments for using FOSS Android (or at least, not an iPhone).
• KDE Connect (FOSS): An amazing app that lets you sync with KDE Connect on KDE Plasma or GSConnect on the GNOME desktop on your computer. Lets you send SMS/MMS from your computer, and sync files, contacts, and/or notifications between your phone and computer. SMS access is extremely cantankerous, in my experience, but a lifesaver (when it works).

General Utilities

• Material Files (FOSS): This is a file manager with a lot of features and a very clean interface
  • I also use the stock file manager that comes with CalyxOS (just called "Files", but there's a version on the Play Store which I have not tested. The reason I sometimes use "Files" is because it has more access to some system directories than any of the apps you can download from F-Droid (except for those that have root permission, which my Android OS doesn't allow)
• KeePassDX (FOSS): A great mobile companion to KeepassXC. Use with something like Syncthing-Fork to keep your .kdbx file in sync with your other systems.
• WiFiAnalyzer (FOSS): Helpful to know which BSSID you're on.
• Barcode Scanner (FOSS): "Does what it says on the tin," as my TuxJam friends would say.
• Ning (FOSS): helpful network scanner
• OSS Document Scanner (FOSS): Very useful document scanner app
• RustDesk (FOSS): This is a good remote desktop replacement for something like RealVNC.

Browsers

• Default Chromium (or fork): Avoid this. Some of the security-enhanced Android builds have very nice security-enhanced Chromium forks, but it's still chromium, a.k.a., Blink, and you're still contributing to Google's intolerable hegemony of the web.
• Firefox Mobile (and forks): I've used the official Firefox Mobile in the past, then the F-Droid purely FOSS version, Fennec Fox. At the moment, I'm using the security-oriented fork, Mull Browser. All three work pretty well.

Camera

• (Default Camera) (FOSS on FOSS Android OSes): This is very basic, but does the job ok. I don't use it, except for the rare times I'm taking a picture inside another app (i.e., not a camera app, but something like a messaging app), as I have no choice then. It's honestly kind of disappointing.
• Open Camera (FOSS): This is a very powerful camera app, and is the one I recommend for someone wanting a fully-functional FOSS camera app. It's got a bit of a learning curve, but it's not too bad.
• Retroboy (FOSS): This camera app is just for fun, and what I turn to when I'm feeling nostalgic for the Iconfactory's utterly fantastic iOS app, BitCam.
• Pixel Camera (Proprietary): Honestly, this is the best camera app I've ever used, in terms of ease-of-use, performance in all kinds of lighting conditions, and feature set, if and only if you're on version 9.0.115 or before. Google nerfed the UI badly after this version. Again, this is a Google app. Do not install it unless you're running an Android build that allows you to completely firewall apps from the internet.
• GCam Photos Preview (FOSS): This is a FOSS app designed to work with the Pixel Camera app. The problem with the Pixel Camera is that it will only use the Google Photos app as its built-in gallery. GCam Photos Preview app is a simple FOSS gallery app that spoofs Google Photos signature, so that the Pixel Camera thinks it's opening the Proprietary Google Photos app, while it's actually just opening the FOSS Gcam Photos Preview app. Very nice bit of kit!

Misc

• SimpleNote (FOSS): This is my favorite notetaking app. It syncs well with Simplenote (electron) or sncli (python TUI) on the desktop.
• Luanti (FOSS): The voxel game formerly known as Minetest. IIRC, it didn't work very well as a mobile game in years past. It's quite nice, now.
• Termux (FOSS): If your phone doesn't have a full command line, it's lame. 'Nuff said. Termux has a lot of available software packages that can be installed, including a very useful sshd!
• J2ME Loader (FOSS): I haven't used this in a while, but I've used it in the past to play old J2ME games. It's a sweet bit of mobile gaming nostalgia. It doesn't come with any games or J2ME (Java Mobile) applications, but you can find them online and install them. It's really pretty nifty.
• Translate You (FOSS): This is a great FOSS front-end to Google Translate. Very convenient because you can select text in any app and have Translate You translate it in a pop-up.
• Orion Viewer (FOSS): This is the best FOSS PDF viewer I've found for Android so far.
• Habits / Loop Habit Tracker (FOSS): I re-discovered Habits when looking over an old list of android apps I had from a few years back in preparation for this post. I just discovered Loop Habit Tracker this evening when looking for Habits. I will be trying both of them out.

Category: Tech Tagged: Computing Ethics Federated Services FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) Non-religious post PeerTube Productivity Translation WritingMonth