There was once a time where I thought living with apps from only F-Droid was impossible.
Now, F-Droid is my only app store, and I only use Aurora Store for banking apps (and even then, I prefer to do banking on desktop).
I recently switched to a phone with only microG installed, absolutely 0 Google services.
It works insanely well nowadays.
Obligatory droid-ify plug (Material UI client)
Yeah I always look for apps on fdroid first if I need something. It doesn’t have everything but a lot of the time there are great FOSS apps available.
I also love that you can filter apps for different criteria such as privacy, close source dependencies etc.
It’s a great project. Reminds me I should tip them some for their great work.
I always look for apps on fdroid first if I need something
Me too, and if it’s not there then I recently discovered Aurora Store which let’s you download from Google Play anonymously and is itself available on F-Droid.
Reminds me I should tip them
Nice try, Philip J. Fry!
How’s the Aurora Store working right now? Last time I used it, anonymous accounts started getting rate-limited pretty severly, rendering it quite painful to use
Also add IzzyOnDroid for newer packages
Do you know the proper url please? I’ve just searched, and there are a few different results.
My favorite F-droid app: !boinc@sopuli.xyz
- Open Source
- Uses your phone’s spare computational power to help scientists working on everything from cancer research to finding pulsars and black holes. You choose which projects to contribute to. Phones are more compute-per-watt efficient than most computers, and every little bit helps!
- Can’t be published in Google Play store due to their ToS (it downloads and executes code from outside of its own APK which is not allowed)
- Make sure to limit CPU usage to keep temps down. If your phone can’t get rid of heat easily, this app is not for you.
Seems like awful use of your phone battery. Things like this are much better suited to desktop computers than anything that runs off battery. Even if they are more efficient as you say, they wear out much faster, leading to e-waste.
- BOINC has been around for decades and no project containing malware has ever happened. Ultimately you have to trust the BOINC project you are running code from. Most of them are run out of major universities or research institutes.
- BOINC also features code-signing to prevent mitm attacks or somebody breaking into a project server and distributing malware that way. Projects are encouraged to keep the signing keys on an offline machine or at least a different machine, which probably generally is what happens. Most developers do their coding work on one machine and then publish that to a server. Using your server for development would be inconvenient and questionable practice.
- With Android specifically, I don’t know the extent to which malware could even do anything as there’s built-in sandboxing.
- BOINC does also have a sandboxed mode available on Windows, but it will prevent BOINC from using your GPU if you want it to do that. On Linux, BOINC typically runs as an unprivileged user.
