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.
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.
May I suggest you check out KeepassDX? I found it’s UI/UX to be much better a few years ago. Haven’t looked back since.
Breezy Weather is an active fork of Geometric Weather (the latter is abandoned).
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.
