What apps have you been using this year? Have you found new apps to fill a gap in your previous open-source use?
What is something that you wish had a good open-source alternative but does not at this time?
A handfull:
Voice - for audiobooks
Voyager - for lemmy
Aegis - 2FA
KeepassDX - password manager
Syncthing-fork - sync files between units
VLC - music and movies
Librera - ebooks
Niri has been a blast
Shizuku and Canta hands down, debloating my phone greatly increased my battery life.
Librera is a pretty good ebook reader.
KISS Launcher is the best launcher bar none.
Of course KeePassDX is a great password manager.
ThumbKey is the best software keyboard I’ve ever used, nothing else even comes close.
Comaps for navigation. Replaced Organic Maps
Öffi for finding public transit connections. Sadly replaced Transportr which doesnt work anymore for me
Bura for weather forcast. Replaced Geometric Weather which stopped working quite a while ago.
Etar as a calender. Idk i dont use it too much but its enough for my needs.
Quillpad for note taking. Its a fork of a fork of apps which didnt get support anymore. Best notetaking app i came across so far. Love it. Looks good. You can keep it simple but it also has more than enough extra features.
KDE Connect Comes in super handy for quick transfer of files or just the clipboard between the PC and phone. Remote input and mediacontrol is also pretty sweet.
Material Files Best file explorer i know of. I tried so many over the years and its always the app which stays forever on my phones. Its not perfect but so far i found it better than anything else.
Silicone Calculator A simple and pretty calculator
VLC for local playback. Works well with folders which is a must for me. VLC just works for me on whatever device for 20 years.
Too lazy for the rest, sorry: Accrescent as an alternative appstore. From there: Ironfox as browser and ri music for streaming… music.
Pixel Camera, Google Photos and Snapseed are the only non open-source apps on my phone. Need to spend a bit more time with ImageToolbox. Maybe its enough to sunset Photos and Snapseed.
fyi, geometric weather got forked to become breezy weather: https://github.com/breezy-weather/breezy-weather
hell yeah! thanks
Replaced Organic Maps
What are the benefits?
https://news.itsfoss.com/organic-maps-fork-comaps/
Despite being advertised as a community-driven project, key decisions, including financial management, partnerships (with Kayak, for instance), and the inclusion of proprietary components in the code were made by a small group of shareholders, often without input from the broader contributor community.
These shareholders have reportedly used the project’s donation funds for personal expenses, like holiday trips, raising serious concerns about financial transparency.
As a result, many contributors teamed up and forked the project, establishing CoMaps, a new alternative focused on openness and being not-for-profit.
But from user perspective there arent much benefits yet. I like the new muted green a bit more i guess haha
Syncthing/Syncthing-Fork. Simply the best cross-system file synchronization app. Peer-to-peer, no cloud storage.
Scrcpy (Screen Copy). App that mirrors your Android phone to Windows. When I switched away from a Samsung phone I lost the ability to run an app from my phone on my PC desktop. This restores that.
I tried to set this up last week and found it was buggy and unreliable as hell on android.
Maybe I did something wrong, but same server side and 2 different android phones, I open the app after some time has passed and the light thing is green but server shows disconnected. The slide out menu has “restart” greyed out. I force close and reopen the app, then it starts working again.
Does not seem reliable.
I’m also using Syncthing to sync up my notes between my laptop and phone. It’s been great! Less Google doc use.
I’ll start with two new addtions for me:
- Capy Reader (code, F-Droid). While curating my Feedly subscriptions, I decided to try switching to some RSS feeds instead, which I had previously put off because I hadn’t found a client I liked. Capy Reader is excellent both in performance and user interaction, and I find I much prefer reading my sources this way than through Feedly now.
- Readeck (code). Not technically an app, but the website works perfectly well through a mobile browser. A read-it-later service that snapshots web pages and displays them in a friendly, customizable reader mode. The only downside is that it doesn’t cache the full content of the saved pages offline, so you can’t use it without Internet access.
What is something that you wish had a good open-source alternative but does not at this time?
Musicolet
Material notes from f-droid
It’s a handy note taking app where you can sort each note by tagging it into a group. This allows you to have multiple groups and each new note can be tagged to one of those groups. You can also make checklists, color sort the groups, and archive the groups when you don’t need them but might in the future.
As someone who forgets, but likes a sorted toolbox, this is pretty useful for me.
For this I like Joplin. I sync it to nectcloud, access from my phone or computers or whatever, and I organize everything into books.
Nobook, which was shared here last month. Very clean and lightweight app with a much nicer interface than the app I was previously using (Friendly). Thanks to @Blaze@piefed.social for recommending it! It’s not on an app store so I wouldn’t have found it without you sharing it here.
Copypasta of my comment in the post in the F-Droid community:
Chrono is extremely good for me, given often having to have alarms in the oddest of times, and it allowing me to schedule alarms as one-time only, daily, for specific weekdays, for specific dates, or for date ranges, as well as having the options to force to work in the background if lack of memory in the phone kills it.
As for alternatives I wish I could find, Librera Reader is still the best ebook reader I found outside of Google Play, but I could use it having better controls. Might even take the dust off my PS Vita to read ebooks, as I abhor touch controls due to them usually not being optimized for either precision or view space available (even on-screen controls might help), and on the Vita I can use the physical controls to move the ebooks’ pages around.
