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?
Almost everything I use is FLOSS, with some exceptions that can’t be helped.
System:
Droid-ify, Bitwarden, Termux, Ente Auth, Fossify (File Manager, Clock, Voice Recorder, and Gallery), Proton (Mail, Calendar, VPN, Drive), CalcYou, KDE Connect, Tailscale, Offline Translator, Rain (Weather), Brave, Vanadium, Tor, Addy.io (email aliasing)
Media-Based:
Notesnook, Librera FD (e-reader), Collabora Office, OSS File Scanner, Image Toolbox, Ente Photos, WizeStream (YouTube, PeerTube, and SoundCloud client), MetroList (YouTube Music), Jellyfin, Libre Librivox Listener (audio books), Audire (Shazam client), Auxio (local music player)
Social:
Signal, Element X (Matrix), Cheogram, Mastodon, Interstellar (Piefed), Red Reader (Reddit), Slim Social (Facebook)
- 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.
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.
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.
Yeah I’m also not seeing anything about it being foss
Same, and the project seems very “AI”-friendly on other fronts (assistant feature, agentic search). I’m not touching that.
Oh wait, sorry. Pur.ili doesn’t have a source code. Sorry. Use Mojeek or Marginalia instead
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
- Newpipe (replaces youtube app and includes other video platforms)
- Element (Matrix) for chat
- Firefox for browsing the web
- Apps installation: Obtainium for most, directly install apk from GitHub, gitlab,… ; Droid-ify for store-like function
- Keyboard : FUTO, find it the best, includes swipe typing and good dictionary
- Galery: AVES
- Loyalty cards: Catima
- SSH, mosh, sftp, local term,… : Haven, two available version, one with only terminal based and one with remote desktop capability
- File transfer (local network) : LocalSend, easy way to transfer files to people on the same WiFi network, installable through official play store, on windows, Linux,… which allows to use even with non-Foss enthusiasts
- TOTP codes generator: Stratum
- Text editor: Xed-editor
- Calendar: KashCal
- IRC client: HexDroid
- Calculator/Unit converter: Unitto
Aves, Catima, Xed-Editor, Unitto seem to be very cool and useful, thanks!
Mind that FUTO is not FLOSS, just source-available.
Fossify and LibreOffice
LibreOffice? For Android?
libreoffice viewer maybe?
https://f-droid.org/packages/org.documentfoundation.libreoffice/DOOOOOD!! Thank you!!
OK here’s what it is, it’s legit LibreOffice devs which I wasn’t sure of before.
LibreOffice for Android and iOS
The Document Foundation offers a viewer app for LibreOffice documents, with experimental editing support, for Android devices:
To edit documents, there is a LibreOffice-based product in app stores from Collabora, one of our certified developers and ecosystem members:
(On the Collaboration website)
Now available for F-Droid!
Regularly users have asked us about the availability of Collabora Office for F-Droid, the community driven platform focusing on free and open source apps for Android. And now it’s here! Currently we provide two versions: the 4.2.x release – already longer existing, and the snapshot of the unstable 6.4 line. With the latter you can help us test the latest and greatest features! Something we really appreciate, so do contact us!
However, searching in the F-Droid site app list, you will not find it:
- Add the repo using the F-Droid community How To Guide.
- Add the following third party repository: https://www.collaboraonline.com/downloads/fdroid/repo/.
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?
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.
