What is your must have open source application available on fdroid?
New pipe - the YouTube front end is absolutely critical for my lifestyle.
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?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
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.
This is the überapp, 10 yearsinddevelopmenrt and I’m still fascinated reading the changelog on major releases. Use it almost daily.
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).
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
- 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
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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Probably KeepassDX, Syncthing and Mull. Newpipe is also a good one, especially since it also supports PeerTube.
Edit: Oh and I forgot about Jerboa.
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.
- 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!
We need a way to save comment and posts for personal usage later… Nice list. Yoink.
We have it. There’s a save option
Oh yes Aegis Authenticator. Its so essential, I forgot. Plus Bitwarden Passwordmanager
- 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.
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.
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?
NewPipe for Sure. Normal YouTube apps is bloated as hell + NewPipe is very nice to listen music
NewPipe has only one problem: the inability to log into your Google account and keep your subscriptions and watch later playlist synced.
“Problem.”*
Those of us who degoogled see this as a pro not a con.
I’d also blame youtube, iirc there is no way to export your playlists to a .csv, which could then be imported to something like newpipe easily. Of course, youtube doesn’t want to let you do that because the only thing keeping people from newpipe is really this “sunken cost” aspect to it.
You can export YT and YT music subscriptions in CSV format on google takeout: https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout/custom/youtube
Good to know, thanks!
I want to degoogle, but I also want to keep track of which videos I’ve watched already across devices. Maybe Newpipe and similar apps need a self-hosted server companion app. Or maybe a plugin for existing server software, like I dunno, Jellyfin or Nextcloud or something. Maybe using RSS? I’m just brainstorming here…
There are piped and invidious to do exactly this. You can host the server yourself or use a public instance. Subscriptions can be exported using google takeout and imported into piped when creating an account.
I don’t know if the history can be imported too, but at least it keeps track of new history across devices.
I’m not in any way de-Googled, but I’m an old person who just wants to watch the occasional youtube link without all of the extra bullshit, and newpipe is perfect for that. Not having subscriptions or being able to login to my Google account is absolutely a feature, not a bug.
Also, quick plug for NewPipe x SponsorBlock which can be added to F-Droid (I’ve since switched to Obtanium for it)
And of course, though you can’t import your old playlists, you can still create new ones to use with newpipe.
Hell, you might be able to just make your old playlist on youtube “public” and access it with newpipe, and then bookmark that whole playlist, now that I think about it.
I use KeePass and Syncthing, but for mild fun I like Lexica and StreetComplete.
Lexica is a word finding game on a grid with a timer, and it’s very customizable (size of grid, min length of words, length of timer, etc). Words can and often do cross over themselves and run in all directions. Invariably I will miss stupid obvious words, and I’m always interested to see the list of missed words at the end. They provide definitions for the ones you just don’t believe and have to click.
StreetComplete is a way to update Open Streetmap with goals and badges and all that gamification jazz. For an additional personal challenge, try updating house data without making homeowners look at you funny and/or call the cops.
Oh yeah, I use IITC-CE too, because Ingress is life. And Niantic can take a flying leap.