F-Droid which is an open source alternative to Google Play that only contains FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) apps.
F-Droid utilizes something called repositories. The official repository is very strict about which apps can be included so you can add other repos to get more FOSS apps. Izzy's repo is a popular one.
If there are some apps that you can't replace with FOSS ones and need Google Play for that then you can just use Aurora Store. Aurora Store is a FOSS client to access Google Play without an account.
What are some of the FOSS apps you use and would recommend? Oh and how do we feel about a FOSS comm? Here is a request for one
Try and replace one or a few apps with FOSS versions at a time, just slowly but steadily regain your privacy and control over your phone.
K-9 Mail - install the beta to avoid an ancient version (5.600 is Nov 2018)
Lawnchair - nice simple launcher to get rid of annoying Google launcher stuff
Twidere - if you haven't kicked the twitter habit yet.
Antenna Pod - for Citations Needed
OsmAnd~ - navigation without Google's breath tickling the hairs on your neck
Omni Notes
FreeOTP+ - set up 2FA everywhere
KeePassDX - never use the same password twice
Flym (RSS Reader) - there's lots of clones/forks/flavors based on this, I like the barebones original.
Firefox (Nightly Fenix and Klar)
AnySoftKeyboard - your keyboard could be spying on you...plus I think it does prediction/swipe-text better than Google.
Syncthing - very simple but powerful backup/sync
KDE Connect - lots of neat connectivity controls between your phone and desktop computer, like remote control keyboard/mouse, easy file transfer, pass-through chat and notifications.
Aurora Store - for those few apps you still need from Google, but want to download anonymously.
Also NewPipe so you can play youtube in the background, over other apps, and download videos.
NewPipe is unfortunately a buggy mess. If you're not a FOSS purist, use youtube vanced instead
I haven't heard anyone complain about it being buggy before. It stops working sometimes but it's fixed very quickly by an update which is why I recommend using their own repo on F-Droid to get the latest updates as soon as possible
I always had tons of problems with it until I gave up and stopped using it. It would crash regularly and fail to play or download videos more often than not
Have you tried it recently? I recommend it to others because it has more features and it's more privacy friendly. I also think there are other Youtube clients on F-Droid.
been probably like almost a year? and that's when I switched to Vanced and I'm just not going back
Antenna Pod is fucking awesome. It's by far the best podcast manager out there and has gpodder integration so you can sync your listening between devices
I've only tried a few so I can't really compare it with all of the others, but it works really well for me, even with many many (~3500) episodes added to the queue, and many podcasts added overall.
EDIT: If that doesn't work, the tokenizer URL that I sometimes use ishttp://www.auroraoss.in:8080/EDIT2: edited the wrong post...
I have 500 gigs of storage on my phone and have it just auto download everything in the morning. Great for pods like WTYP that are hosted on servers that limit you to like 50kbps
It does. I'm not sure if the functionality is limited but I used it to do some quick file transfers recently.
Edit: I might have misread this. If by "KDE client" you meant the client for KDE, then disregard this. But there is a client for windows that works with the KDE Connect app.
there is a build of KDE connect for Windows, but it doesn't really actually work lol. The only thing I want is to be able to send SMS from desktop, which is broken on Windows with KDE
Metro is also really good. It uses the newer material design too which I like a lot.
Metro is the best music player for android right now except for the infurating bug that albums are listed out of order like "1. 10. 11. 12. 2. 3. 4." sometimes
Also the f-droid ui is pretty ugly for a lot of people, there's an f-droid client called aurora droid made by the same people as aurora store. It looks amazing and works just as well.
Aurora Droid also comes with a lot of repositories that you can easily enable.
Yeah that really helped me really come to use fdroid. There's a lot of good stuff in the default fdroid repos but being able to have easy access to the KDE repo and izzyondroid was really awesome.
Hey thanks! I didn't know about the Aurora Store. Sadly I still can't use it, I enabled Custom Tokenizer, but login still fails. Do I have to change the tokenizer?
I use Aurora and I'm able to log in with the Custom Tokenizer turned off in the settings.
Unfortunately I don't use Aurora Store myself so I can't really help. This is why I think having a comm would be really helpful. Maybe @garbology uses Aurora Store and can help?
every once in a while, the default tokenizer will break, and the store wont work. Only when that happens, turn on custom tokenizer instead. When custom stops working again, switch back to default. Been using Aurora about 6 months I've had to do that cycle once so far
Might not be the best place to ask this, but has anyone managed to get Signal working without connecting to all the google shit? I've got google blocked on my phone, and even after just downloading and installing the apk from their website it won't let me actually into the thing without google play services, which seems insane for an app that's supposed to be about privacy
Moxie has been pretty consistent that he wants Signal to stick with G services (though it should work without now ) and doesn't allow (as much as he can) forks of signal and does not support federation .
yes. Install Aurora Store and then install Signal from there
edit: ah hold up, you mean by "google blocked" that you have no Google Play Services/gapps installed? or just that you're not signed into your google account etc
Yeah sorry I wasn't clear, I can install it no problem just from the downloaded apk, but then the initial sign-in thing says it's having problems with google play services and refuses to proceed.
I have 1e100 dot net etc firewalled so my phone can't talk to any of the google services and I feel like it would be incredibly counterproductive to unfirewall it for the sake of a "privacy" app
have you tried MicroG? p sure I used signal with microg but it's been a while since I had that set up
MicroG has a repo for F-Droid btw and it's included in Aurora Droid
Any good productivity apps? I'm trying to use my phone less and want to block specific apps at specific times of day
I don't know any but you might wanna make a separate post for others to see.
