Basically, what the title says. Do you use any app, that is proprietary, but either has no OSS alternatives or they’re all not good enough? If there is an alternative, what keeps you from switching?
Termius
Not just Android, I want a cross-platform ssh client that shares keys. Termius is probably overkill for that, but I haven’t found anything else that works on Linux and Android. The real issue that made me stop paying for it is that for rpm based Linux I have to use the snap version and snap is buggy as heck with multitasking.
Basically every app that is related to a proprietary service. Amazon, Battle.net and Steam authenticators, banking apps, Spotify, etc.
for steam authenticator Aegis works too. For google’s and microsoft’s custom app too, and a bunch of others, even some non-standard ones
FYI, you can replace Steam Guard. There is a plugin for Keepass that can generate Steam OTP codes and it’s built in in KeepassXC (IIRC) and in KeepassDX on android.
I’m actually pretty happy to be using mostly FOSS apps. The exception are banking or services apps, which I’d never expect to be available as open source.
Android Auto
That one DAW for electronic music… The logo had a hexagon or something… Caustic maybe?
Agree there are no decent daws no real actual one’s on Android that are opensource and or contain a loop library that’s not like an infant made it, they are all primarily proprietary and pretty much a bag of t*rds so far except I hear for FruityLoops but it’s expensive and still nothing comparitively to the PC version it’s half a job. The only good free one is Garageband on IOS devices but again it’s free to use but proprietary software made by Apple’s Logic team I think. Android is looking like a complete idot on that front compared to Garageband versus any and all combined daws they have built for it so far in in either/and/or open or closed source.
Hmmm I do need a reason to learn rust… But a cross platform DAW feels like too big of a project for my level of disorganization 😹
Maybe I should try building ardour for android, it would be way easier to rebuild Ardour’s UI for mobile.
That was the one that came to mind while your at it maybe add a shortcut for extending a sound region to the full length of the track eg. Logic Pro X uses the L key for this I suspect it stands for Loop, but yeah would be awesome to have some ported daw that can also be used on Android TV OS for TV boxes like the Shield TV and these super powerful Rockchip RK3588 chipset TV OS boxes like the Mekotronics R58 mini and R58X range I have one, the idea would definitely work for those as they are powerful S series samsungs definitely to, mouse capability and keyboard for TV boxes obviously would have to be included as they don’t have touch screens.
All these mouse cursor touchpad for big phones-apps. They seem pretty easy to do and are quite handy.
Kde connect has that I think
No, KDE connect has a very different purpose.
Oh, I see what you mean. I thought you meant using your phone as a trackpad sorry
Shazam (or equivalent)
Hi, thanks a lot, I’ll sure try them both!
The default Samsung messages app. It allows custom backgrounds for each text conversation. All apps I find only allow custom colors, no custom wallpaper. Eben Google messenger had this feature… Then they took it out and replaced it with pre selected ‘color themes’
My banking app ಠ_ಠ
And mine. And probably everyone else’s since the only banking app I can find on F-Droid is something called Varengold.
Dating apps.
We need an open source completely free dating app.
No paying for matches, no limits …just they’re in your town, you look at their photos, you can talk, anyone can block anyone.
I’m with you, but see a million obstacles (aka. reasons for why things require payments).
You would need some form of moderation, to weed out illegal content as well as simply bots, spam, and dead profiles. Also for message content. I’ve given it some thought and suspect it can be crowd sourced to some degree, but also needs counter balances. Instead of limiting a profile to be live/banned, you could have a percentage score of peer-reported subjective legitimacy (ditto for message responses, heck you could even have a section of outright reviews of the person’s behaviour - although that, again would be subject to abuse and moderation).
Hosting, traffic, etc. would be an unavoidable cost, but can be mitigated with low resolution photos (VGA should be “good enough” for an initial impression, no?)
For sure, an open source solution would offer way more fine grained filtering.
@DarkCloud create a Mastodon instance, write your instance rules, moderate. That’s it. Plus you’ll be connected to the whole fediverse, existing client apps will work.
I don’t really care for online dating, but I remember coming across this. They claimed to be open source.
I’m honestly pleasantly surprised to see that this project seems to be rather actively developed.
Which is completely separate from having a meaningful user base (near you), so 🤷
Which is completely separate from having a meaningful user base (near you), so 🤷
Yep, this unfortunately seems to be a much hard problem
Great, but creating such an app would require someone to foot the bill for hosting user data, the web app and this can easily amount to quite a substantial sum. Not to mention that supporting this app would also be quite time consuming.
Not to mention you’d need moderation for all kinds of scams or even pedo stuff… It’s a risky one.
Legal waiver (no one under 18) and six picture limit, you can only change your pictures once a week.
So write it to be decentralized, like BitTorrent or limewire, but for dating.
Then do it yourself if you think this can be done so easily.
I do think it would be easier, I think it’s my answer to the question asked. Look at the post again.
It’s nothing personal dude, it’s just someone’s question on the Internet. The question isn’t about whether it would be easy.
Nova launcher.
I Haven’t found one that works so well with KLWP or has good app drawer organization. I like having folders and tabs to split everything up. Having one big list of apps (70% I dont use often and another 10% bloat) isn’t useful.
Same. I’ve been attempting to de-Google and stick with FOSS where possible, but only Lawnchair has come close to Nova Launcher, but it’s not without its limitations like setting a primary home screen, and better widget padding and removing round corners.
I’m still experimenting with others, but many are no longer under active development either.
@FuryMaker @helpImTrappedOnline
nova launcher has been the last app without foss replacement for me until I found neolauncher.
Using the option ‘categorize apps as tabs’ I have the great drawer behavior as with Nova.
Though development is slow, you can get in contact with them on the matrix channel.
(Oh, just remembered that I still have one non foss app for my Yamaha receiver)
I’ve used several launchers but there seems to be a halt developing them. For the most time, I used to use recently Neo Launcher, but it feels dated now, they are working on a rewrite and it’s still beta (if not still alpha). Kvaesitso is a good launcher, but I’m too accustomed to the swipe up gesture to show apps and Kvaesitso just decided to make it upside down for me, and it feels odd even if you can change this to your preference. Finally, KISS launcher, which had halted development a bit but I find light and customizable enough. Not gonna lie here, as soon as Neo launcher gets to a stable state, I’m coming back.
Edit:
I wanted to mention a couple of killer features of KISS that you might probably like:
- Its dock can pin a couple of apps and have some spaces changing depending on the frequency of use.
- You can have a list of frequently used apps associated to a gesture (I use swipe-up and single-touch).
- If you are gonna use a not too frequently used app, you can have a gesture for this too (I use long-touch).
- Everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, is searchable. Well, not everything, but they surely allow you to search a lot of things.
We need a NOVA replacement with how they’ve recently restructured the company. It looks like NOVA is getting squeezed for the last few cents they’ve got to offer by whom ever bought the company 1-2 years ago.
I’ve tried every other launcher I could find. In my opinion they all seemed to be minimalistic by design or they just lacked features.
fwiw lawnchair beta works absolutely fine for me, i guess it can’t do anything fancy with the app drawer but like, that’s why you have a home screen…
I recently switched launchers. Have you tried Kvaesitso? It’s the best I’ve tried. It allows you to create categories in your app drawer, and organize that way. I’ve really been liking it.
There already was a post like this this year but now my answer is “a standardized push notification system (most likely federated) that’s actually possible to be implemented in a user friendly way”. Google doesn’t want to encrypt theirs afaik and apparently some people are concerned about the traditional “every app is responsible for its own notifications” approach consuming much more battery, even though I didn’t notice it myself (I guess it’s possible if you have 50+ apps installed but it’s not something that should be a thing in the first place).
This ready exists. I forget what it’s called.
I know about that but afaik almost nobody uses it. The only app I know that supports it is Mercurygram which is a Telegram client.
How does Element and Signal implement push notifications?
Idk about Element but Signal uses the Google’s insecure implementation if the device has gapps installed and it uses the traditional system which is not push if gapps are not installed.
Molly (a hardened Signal mobile client fork) has a UnifiedPush version.
I was just thinking, how does one stop signal from sending the notifications to google, when moving to Molly with UP? is that automatic somehow?
Ah okay, thanks for the insight. I don’t have Gapps (MicroG or otherwise), so I do wonder how these services deliver their notifications.
If it’s not using GCM then it must be long polling, unless signal servers are set up to use a 3rd form of push (APNS for iOS, GCM for Android)
Unified Push?
People have hit on most of them here, but here is another big one:
Fitness apps. Mainly calorie tracking, workout tracking and heart rate tracking
Health app
Sleep as Android
(No, gadget bridge is not a replacement for 99% of cases and doesn’t even support the gold standard for heart rate tracking, polar H10)
For calorie tracking, the massive food databases required, barcode scanning, and crowd sourcing are generally not compatible with the open source community’s privacy ideals. OpenNutriTracker has promise though!
For workout tracking, none of them have any device support and most of them are dead and abandoned. Not to mention heart rate zones, stats and training trends, etc… FitoTrack and Opentracks are good starts though.
And then a google fit alternative. Something that can integrate sleeping, workouts, heart rates, sensors, etc… Data all in one aggregates place. It is a huge task and it makes sense that there is no open source alternative for it. Especially when the components aren’t individually there to aggregate.
I was looking for Sleep As Android too!! Separately to this I saw a comment on R a while ago asking for FOSS alternatives, and to say the dev’s response was out-of-touch would be an understatement. They just complained about not being able to make a living from a FOSS app…
Regarding Gadgetbridge though, those devs and contributors are running into more and more accessories using encrypted protocols which is a bit worrying. Right now I’ve settled on the BangleJS which has official support, just wish it had a more accurate heart rate sensor!
My dream FOSS health app would be some concoction of OpenScale and Gadgetbridge 😂
Sleep As Android is hands down the #1 app on my phone I cannot give up. It’s THE reason I could never switch to Apple. I’ve gone beyond basic use and now have it automating things based on sleep actions and I kind of love it.
Picsart. I’d like something that can do a bit of photo editing, adjust brightness/contrast/curves, work with layers, and conveniently slap together collages, but that doesn’t interrupt me in between every other with an ad or a request to sign up for a subscription to the app.
Have you tried Image Toolbox? It might not tick all the boxes, but it’s fairly good for me
OpenCamera is good, but could do better. But I’d say video editing is the biggest void.
Also, gesture typing keyboards are an empty niche of foss alternatives. HelioBoard requires loading some proprietary blob unfortunately.
I guess the most heavy machine learning use cases are not filled in.
For gesture typing I use AnySoftKeyboard and it’s quite ok. It has a lot of options that make it very convenient for me, despite it’s reputation.
The FUTO keyboard has swipe tying, but it’s not as fluid imo
isn’t this one proprietary?
You’re right, it’s some FUTO license and has some limitations that make it not FOSS.
Also, gesture typing keyboards are an empty niche of foss alternatives. HelioBoard requires loading some proprietary blob unfortunately.
FlorisBoard is on the way to implement swype-typing. Unfortunately, it is unlikely to be very soon.
wasn’t the last update 2 years ago?
Latest release candidate was released a few days ago.
