Simple Mobile apps have been very popular among FOSS enthusiasts. I've personally been using the Gallery, Contacts and the Phone app since a few years now. It's a shame that it has come to this, will be on the lookout for their forks.
Jeez, why can't we have nice things ?!
What are the alternatives ? I'll be searching.
If you guys find something, please, report back.
Edit: For gallery, this looks promising: https://f-droid.org/packages/deckers.thibault.aves.libre/
The one and only up to date dialer app I could find. Updated 50 minutes ago at the time of posting this: https://github.com/oxcened/opendialer
Aves Libre is a great gallery app, and Amaze is a good file manager
Looks like one of the maintainers/contributors has already set up a fork.
https://github.com/FossifyX
His original comment of not wanting to fork to respect Tibor's decision to sell his users out doesn't make me confident in him.
I'd like to think he was just trying to be respectful of the author, probably having worked quite a bit together. But he changed his mind pretty quickly when he saw the original author had totally checked out. Maybe that's a generous reading though.
Maybe he wasn't even aware of this until everyone else was and got blindsided too. I'm still wary but I'll give him a shot.
From the comment thread it sounds like the contract might be on shaky ground. The original dev seems to be under the impression that a project licensed under GPLv3 can just be freely changed to another license, which it cannot without explicit consent from all contributors. We don't know the contract language of course, but the dev said it would "likely" not remain open source, which indicates that he told them they could change it. ZippApps' lawyers will hopefully notice that and refuse to buy, though either way we shouldn't trust this maintainer again and should move to the forks.
Not great, but it's open source. If they try anything, just fork it and move on to the fork.
Even if it's removed from fdroid because they want to close source it, I assume my current installations of their apps would be unaffected - just become stale and obsolete over time since they won't get updates... But as they're offline anyway, not too concerned in the short term. Hopefully the company respects the privacy amd care of the open source community and won't take that away from us, though. One way to find out.
When ZipoApps adds advertisements and telemetry to a future version of the Simple Mobile Tools apps, will my Google-Play-installed apps be automatically updated to the newer version with ads and telemetry? I don't want ZipoApps to get any of my data.
Fuck
So now I have to contact all the family members where I removed the bloatware and replaced with the smt apps, uninstall them before the "just 39 euro per week for adfree" subscription scam starts, find suitable replacements, train people to get used to new icons...
There're good alternatives for every app, the only real lost are contacts and dialer, imo.
The Gallery is also the most feature-rich one in FOSS with even a video editor. Couldn't find any other FOSS video editors out there.
I also was an user but Aves Libre is a very good replace if you don't mind the video editing aspect. But yeah, that app also probably deserve a good fork.
Goodwy seems to be forks of SMT apps https://github.com/Goodwy?tab=repositories. Open source, no ads, no trackers and no internet permission, unfortunately you have to either compile yourself or download them from the play store. https://play.google.com/store/apps/dev?id=8268163890866913014
