Favorite FOSS Android Apps for a De-Googled Phone
Favorite FOSS Android Apps for a De-Googled Phone
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).
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Keyboards:
- 8Vim if you're in the mood for a very well made and very difficult keyboard. I've used it for a while and I still suck at it, but I'm not getting bored.
- also FUTO (the company that makes Grayjay if you're familiar) released a keyboard, and it's quite good.
More importantly it incorporate an on device voice recognition. I use it for French and English and I'm very happy with it. You can install it as a standalone.
I'll try to play with those a bit when I do my next regular smartphone build. I've got a OP Nord N200 on order as my next project.
The one I just did was a flip-phone form factor, so I went with Traditional T9 (which I'm kind of loving but that may just be the fact that I have physical keys again lol)
Build, as in assembling hardware?
Other well made and fun keyboard is the one from Dessalines: https://github.com/dessalines/thumb-key
I loved T9. In a way I still use it to launch apps on my phone (Appdialer). I wish there was an open source version of that app.
Build, as in assembling hardware?
Oh, no, lol (but I wish!) More like a Linux build. Sometimes I build from source (for fun or necessity), sometimes I use someone else's build. Breathes new life into my old devices that would otherwise be rotting in a drawer. Like, a while back, I updated my old ca. 2016 Moto G4 from Android 6 to 11.
I have old phones lying around in about every room of the house, usually as Home Assistant remotes and VOIP handsets. All of them relatively up to date with custom ROM builds.
ah, gotcha. yeah, smartphones are amazing devices, feels bad letting them gathering dust.
I daily drove Ubuntu Touch for a few months. It was quite usable!