Has anyone noticed that apps on F-Droid or that you just get from GitHub are just better than the ultra-popular apps on the play store? Most of them are open source and have no ads or trackers. But this isn’t true on the Play Store at all.
I see myself always getting apps from F-Droid now because there is always an alternative to the ad-infested bloated privacy infesting BS that I find on the play store. It’s unfortunate that it’s gotten this bad, where the only reason I even use the play store is to install updates or games.
F-droid is also my preferred source of apps. But the search function is quite bad. I often search the repository from the website on my PC, to find that is in there and then look for apps with exact names on the F-droid app.
Nothing except FOSS apps will get installed on my phone. With Exodus Privacy you can check your Playstore apps for trackers. Sometimes sickening how much shit gets installed with an app. Do it then switch to FOSS.
For bonus points, you can use fdroidcl to reinstall your fdroid apps from a list when you reset your phone!
Because of this thread, I found out there is an app to download directly from soulseek to your phone! Awesome.
One is designed to be a tool and actually used by a dev made out of passion. The other is a product that doesn’t trust you with their source and expects you to trust them back. Nor do you have a say in the development or any undesired features that may be added.
Definitely check out Obtanium if using apps from GitHub.
Hi, can you share some examples of alternatives you grabbed so that I can get started
Here are some apps I’ve switched to
AntennaPod - For podcasts, pretty much the best app out there
Simple calender - For calender use
Feeder - RSS feed reader. Useful replacement for news apps
Simple Gallery Pro - As the name suggests, it’s a clean, simple offline photo and video viewer with some neat features
Lawnchair - My launcher of choice. A good balance of speed and customisability.
Just notes - Keep replacement
K9 mail - Gmail app replacement. FairEmail is a strong contender too.
Keepass2Android - Password manager
Neostore - F-droid alternative
Geometric Weather - My preferred weather app of choice (Edit - For a more updated fork of this, check comment below)
Wefwef - Kinda mimics apollo for lemmy. It’s pretty neat imo.
Honourary mention - Infinity for reddit (RIP)
Lichess - rather than chess.com
Rustdesk - remote desktop software
Syncthing - rather than Dropbox
KDE Connect - phone/computer integration (notifications, media control, mouse and keyboard, file sharing, presentation remote, clipboard sharing, etc)
Aves gallery,
Organic maps
PlayBook - audiobook player
Bitwarden - password manager,
Droid-ify - F-droid client
Element - matrix client (potentiall alternative to discord)
GrapheneOS is also great.
I loved Infinity. Shame they aren’t moving it to Lemmy, and instead they’re making it a subscription.
Agreed. Although I’m pleased to see them survive through this, I really hoped they’d make a Lemmy client. As a platform, this just makes more sense.
Seems so bizzare though and contradictory. Like not wanting to use the official reddit app that is free and not restricted, but too addicted to reddit to quit that they are willing to pay a subscription to be able to continue to reddit on the app they want. That’s like a super hardcore reddit addict more than regular users who scoffed at the idea of a boycott.
Haha, funny and sad at the same time. Apart from addiction though, the sentiment to support the developer who had worked so hard to bring to app to them might be at play too. I know many users who are willing to either donate to the Infinity dev directly and patch the apk for themselves, or pay the subscription cost only if it has a profit margin for the dev. Nobody wants to pay reddit.
the official reddit app that is free and not restricted
Hahahahahaha
Oh you’re serious
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
To me someone paying monthly to continue posting on reddit through a third party app because they are too addicted to quit is more ridiculous than using the official app. At that point they are participating and adding content that increases engagement on reddit. There’s no stance of being anti reddit at that point. They are officially a reddit addict. So yeah, I do look down on them more than official reddit app users.
Breezy Weather is an active fork of Geometric Weather (the latter is abandoned).
Oh, thank you so much! I’ve been searching for something like this for a while!
I’ll give you a few from F-Droid (and maybe IzzyOnDroid too):
- Auxio is a pretty good lightweight music player
- NewPipe is an anonymous YouTube client without ads or tracking
- Obtanium is an app that allows you to auto-update apps from many sources like GitHub, GitLab, and F-Droid
- Bromite (use this repo instead of the out of date F-Droid version) is a hardened version of Chromium with features like ad blocking and less spyware Those are just a couple apps, there are a ton more on F-Droid. I reccomend using the Droid-ify client because it has more default repos and better UI.
As someone that is very new to FOSS, especially on mobile, it sounds like F-Droid is a Play Store replacement. Where can I download that safely?
I would guess the safest way would be through the project side: https://f-droid.org/
Other commenters recommended droidify, I personally like Neo Store. Both are good options!
Aside from the site which others have linked to go further you could also verify with the signing keys to make sure the apk is indeed one from f-droid
https://f-droid.org/en/docs/Release_Channels_and_Signing_Keys/
I personally use Droidify. It’s an f-droid client.
I’ve been on iOS for 4 months. These are the things that make me miss android. My iphone got stolen from hand last week so I had an opportunity to go back to android (and save a ton of money) but decided to continue to ride it out on iphone for a bit. I should stop looking at android stuff so I don’t get too jealous.
Is there any Foss stuff on iOS without jailbreak?
I guess you can use AltStore. I heard you have to renew the apps every 7 days, though
