I’m currently looking to develop an open source app that can help somebody. I’m currently out of ideas, so I’d like to heard if from you guys.
Sorry if it seems to lazy to ask for ideas like that, I just thought that I could do it since the result will be a free app.
A modern replacement for OpenScan. It’s workable, but some features don’t work on Modern Android, and a good Scanner app is probably something most people could use. Could look at Adobe Scan and Office Lens for feature inspiration.
Yeah office lens is pretty much unbeatable. Open source would be amazing, but I at one point had about 6 document scanners on my phone and none of them held a candle to lens…
Microsoft is shit, but they have 2 apps that are not exploitative and are very great to use
Authenticator and Lens. They don’t ask for any permissions that they don’t need. They don’t even require Microsoft account log in to work. They also have no ads, subscription, or premium prompts. Lens just requests files and camera. No location, no tracking, no cloud needed. It can simply be all local document scanning with great filtering,
Authenticator can be used with only camera permissions and it also it able to to push auth with key pairs, a step above general TOTP (though I still use everything with Aegis outside of work).
Not enshittified. Yet…
It would be a huge undertaking, but a Fitness and Health tracker / aggregator that could replace Google Fit and the likes.
I really can’t bear how Google, Apple, Samsung, and all these big companies are the primary holders of our most intimate information. I’ve put some measures in place to limit who gets what, but it would be a huge boon to be the sole maintainer of my own info.
The problem is that the various apps and devices which report data won’t immediately support syncing with a FOSS upstart…
The app I use for grabbing my weight and BMI can only sync with a few other apps. The app I use for calorie and diet tracking can likewise only sync with a few apps. They happen to have Google fit in common, so I use that as an intermediary to transfer weight to the calorie/diet app. All my steps, exercise, and sleep stay in Zepp, separate from them all.
It sure would be nice to have one service/application to rule them all and a secure method of storing one’s own personal information without having to give it to the tech companies. Sure, use one of the many cloud services but encrypt all the data so that they can’t steal it. Yadda yadda.
One can dream.
I develop a self-hosted service designed to do exactly this! It’s not quite finished yet, but it’s at the point where enough functionality works that it can be used for testing.
https://github.com/connervieira/HealthBox
The docs/USAGE.md file gives an overview of how HealthBox works. Feel free to poke around in the other docs/ files as well.
My banking apps. They are the only reason I can’t fully de-google myself.
My philosophy is if I can use a web page for it, I won’t install an app (couple of exceptions, but a good rule). Less convenient, more secure.
As KMFDM have it, “Those who sacrifice liberty for security Deserve neither and will lose both”
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My bank uses the app to auth logins to website bank.
God, you know what I really wish I could do?
Run an Android VM on my phone. Imagine being able to do whatever you want with your device and still having a “stock” device for those pesky apps without having to actually have two phones.It is seemingly possible, but the only app I’ve ever seen do it was “VMOS”: a proprietary app, impossible to trust.
I’m running Android apps on my laptop using Waydroid. Works really well
You usually want to use banking apps when you are away from home though.
A laptop is portable, but that’s right that it’s kind of cumbersome.
But then, I only manage my bank account on my desktop PC at home. I realized that I really don’t need it on my phone, and even if I did, I could just open it in Firefox on my phone
The Transit app, used for bus/train route info and buying tickets. I imagine the ticket buying part would be difficult to OS, but I just want the live transit routing info. A few apps exist for other cities, but not mine. Worst part is Transit relies on Google Maps.
Obsidian.
Is the obsidian Android App not open source? I thought all their stuff was. Kinda embarrassed I never checked.
Nah they use “an open standard” being just markdown files or something, but the apps are still proprietary as far as I’m aware
I really hate how I sometimes, though rarely, see Obsidian talked about as if it were open source just because it uses an open standard
Like Photoshop isn’t open source because it can use PNG kinda thing
Any image/video editor in Android. I’ve been trying Image Toolbox, but sometimes it doesn’t work or crashes :(
Komoot and strava… General route planning and teavkinv software…
There is an IOS app for hot air balloon pilots called “Hot Air”. There is a similar app for Android that… Leaves much to be desired.
There’s several functions that are needed. First, we need a map. We need to be able to enter waypoints and/or polygons charting landing zones, prohibited zones, targets, etc. we need an easy way to select targets, and our bearing and distance to those targets.
For planning purposes, we need a bearing line that we can place and move on that map. We need to be able to easily drag and drop each end of the line, and get the bearing and distance between the endpoints.
Next, we need track recording. It should record a ground track during flight, preferably with altitude information, and notes about the flight.
Next, a wind map. The wind speed and direction varies considerably by altitude. It needs to record direction and speed as we climb and descend, telling us what altitude has winds favorable for our current target.
Bonus points if we can prepopulate that wind map with data from a “pibal” (pilot balloon; a simple latex party balloon released and tracked with compass and stopwatch before a flight)
Next, coordination with other pilots and ground crews. 3D location sharing between participants; wind map data shared between pilots.
I support this just because it’s something so niche that I believe you balloon people deserve it. I feel like we all with our own requests for media players and readers and launchers and messengers have at least a couple usable options and tons of options that may require getting used to or some compromise, but are there. But an app for balloon pilots? There’s something that probably is in dire need of something else.
Meme Generator
The only true answer
Something like memetastic? https://github.com/gsantner/memetastic
Yea I know about it but you can’t make any of the modern memes with it. It only supports top and bottom text memes, which have been outdated for a couple of years now.
Obsidian.
Markor is a great open source markdown editor for android, but I wish we had some decent WYSIWYG options, like obsidian, typora, etc.
Doesn’t have exactly the same features but I’ve simply been using Logseq syncing my notes with Syncthing
Logseq is pretty close
Joplin already does a great job for this, at least for notes.
I used Joplin extensively for ~2 years, but I was constantly put off by the desktop applications UI and how my notes was stored in SQLite. The move to obsidian felt natural and I felt more in ownership over my files in their existing structure. Granted, obsidian is closed source and could go rogue, but when that happens, I am prepared to jump ship without too much pain.
Exactly. Not a huge fan of notes apps storing the data in a db.otherwise there is a lot to like about joplin. With obsidian i open my notes in codium all the time to make mass edits or fill gaps that obsidians UI cant meet, which is not possible with joplin.
Fortunately with obsidian as long as you keep the plugins on the lighter side and keep any non-markdown content in seperate files via linking, im not too worried about having to jump ship if it ever goes bad. Worst case if a plugin dies or i have to migrate, the actual loss of data is that some plugin used json or whatever and it’d have to be converted or replaced.
I do have hope at least that if the company folds they’ll open source it, or turn a blind eye to a community reengineering effort. And what is unique about obsidian markdown and metadata will probably get community-built migration tools quickly if enough people jump ship en masse.
But for the time being Obsidian is the best option for me and i dont feel that bad about it.
I don’t see the hate for storing data in a sqlite database. It’s still your data, you get to do with it as you please, and I’ve yet to see the data encrypted (let’s not give anyone any silly ideas here). You want to see your data outside of the program, just download any sqlite viewer. If you don’t mind CLI, then the tools provided by sqlite are more than good enough and are only a few MB in size.
Generally speaking I’m not opposed to sqlite. The case of a notes app is the one exception.
If i need to make a big find and replace change, i dont need to rely on the app to have the capability or whip out a sql editor or cli tool. I just open my favorite text editor and do it. Or chain some cli tools built into the os.
Its not even about data portability or export. Its about working with the data.
IMO Obsidian is already a little rogue, in the sense that it only supports their sync. I know you can glue something together by syncing the folder itself, but that’s not convenient or the point. For now I’ll stick with Joplin because it works with nextcloud nicely.
There is at least plugins that enables sync by alternative ways. They’re not as elegant, but work.
Since everything, including settings, is stored in the same root folder as the notes - you can sync your settings along your notes through other tools too.
Oh, I’ll take a look at those plugins.
I am not an excessive note-taking guy, but I am using Notesnook for some time now and it does everything I needed so far.
Seems okay, but doesn’t allow editing of local files / folders, it wants you to use their paid sync service. Also its javascript / electron, not native android.
Logseq has an Android version, right?
yeah, and the UI is absolutely atrocious.
Nova launcher - there isn’t a good one for one FOSS replacement. Every launcher I tried from fdroid has at least one shortcoming (if not more).
Everyone I’ve tried from the Play store feels too basic compared to Nova or their rating is too low because of bugs.
Edit: in hindsight it looks like I’m a paid shill for Nova. This isn’t the case at all. I’ve been looking at launchers for the past few weeks as I recently realised I’ve had the same set up style for over a decade. I don’t want to be the person stuck in the past doing stuff the slower and archaic ways when there are newer and better ways of doing things. I currently have over 20 launchers installed on my phone and I’ve been slowly trying some.
I really like Kvaesitso though I’ll admit I keep going back to Nova
Agreed. Yet to find a true replacement
Yeah, Hyperion is the closest I’ve found. Also what I’m currently using
Doesn’t look like Hyperion is open source :(
Until there’s a FOSS version of Nova, I guess I’ll keep using Nova and have my firewall block its outgoing traffic.
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Readably
No RSS reader is quite like it.
Synfonium
Best music player out there.
Why is there not an app that tells you which grocery stores have the best prices? I should be able to give it a list and it’ll tell me where to buy each item.
Because grocery stores don’t make that data accessible to third party developers, otherwise someone would do what you’re suggesting and they’d risk you shopping elsewhere.
Bah, the data is on their websites, figure out how to collect it.
Go ahead and try scraping an arbitrary list of sites without an API and let me know how that goes. It would be a constant maintenance headache, especially if you’re talking about anything other than the larger chains that have fairly standardized sites
I bet an AI could do it
And we also explored the AI option, it always turned out unrealistic. Either you would have to scrape the content and send it to the AI to parse the info, but then you’d be paying for every scrape, or run a powerful rig nonstop, but the results would still be hit and miss. Or you might let the AI generate the code for the scraping module, still not ideal, they were constantly hallucinating things that weren’t there.
I’ve been webscraping in my job for 6 years. Yes, it’s a constant headache, they keep updating their sites and improving their antibot protections. But it can be done and some companies are doing it (on a biiiiig scale). It’s just not very realistic that an open-source project would be able to invest that much effort into all the updates. Well some do, youtube-dl is basically webscraping and they are pretty up-to-date. It’s just very rare.
Symfonium. Don’t get me wrong, I like Finamp, but it just does not come close to the amount of features that Symfonium has.
Tempo is pretty good.
Definitely one of the apps where premium is worth it.
