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?
Bitwarden. Most people think that their application is open source, but more and more of their code has shifted from the GPL/AGPL licensed code to code in their SDK, which is under a proprietary license. This led to their new Android app being disqualified from being hosted in F-Droid repos.
Keyguard was supposed to be an open source Bitwarden client, but the dev chose to use a custom proprietary license, so that is source available as well.
Oh!! I didn’t know that … :/
Just yesterday I deployed it locally, and was about to migrate from my keepasDX (+syncthing)…
Don’t get me wrong: BW is still a pretty good service, and the proprietary code is still readable by anyone, but the fact that they’re moving a bunch of their previously open source licensed code to something that’s source available is definitely unfortunate.
KeePass, on the other hand, has tons of actually open source clients, which definitely gives them an edge for people that don’t mind syncing their own DB.
I’ve been a paying bitwarden customer for years but i through they were moving more towards free software and not away from it… Makes me consider quitting my subscription. Why do they do this?
Makes me wish Proton had their own password manager.
Proton Pass is a thing mate take a look it might suit your needs
I don’t know much about Proton. Isn’t their back end proprietary though?
thanks for getting the word out!
KeePassDxX on F-Droid it also has export function, bit awkward you could call it, but it’s a functioning password storage tool that’s using local storage with your export and import options like to a file or cloud I think as well never used that but think it’s there? It may lack some of the features of say Bitwarden though because I have never used Bitwarden.
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.
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.
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 don’t 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.
There are so many. By usage however:
Smart Audiobook Player: None of the apps I tried had all the features in one, like reading my complex audiobooks folder structure and auto grouping the books based on that. Timer to pause audiobook that is automatically reset by moving the phone.
Maps: No foss solutions work better where I live than GMaps
YTMusic: So this is a tough one to beat because of the nature of the platform itself.
Notes: I am looking for a P2P syncable note app that can also have a web interface or atleast a Linux version of the App. Allows drawing your notes on an android phone or tablet using stylus, and other usual features. Can also use cloud storage as a backup or sync source. I know this one is a really tall order.
OSMAnd works really well. For YTMusic, you can instead pick LibreTube and use it in music player mode.
If you live in an area that’s missing the data, it doesn’t matter how good the app is. I regularly upload in my area, but it will be years before it is reliable as a primary app. I usually search in Organic Maps first, then in Google Maps. OSM gets me where I need about 10-20% of the time at most. Google Maps is about 99%.
There are multiple front-ends for YT Music. Song Tube is good, Libre Tube is good, Inner Tune, Musify, Vibe You, etc. I haven’t used them all so I can’t testify to them, but it is a deep bench.
For ytmusic you can try innertune
Logseq and syncthing could work for your notes. Logseq has a whiteboard feature that can be used with a stylus, and syncthing is p2p.
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.
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.
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.
Thank you for your suggestion.
Having just tried it, it is not for me. The categories is there, but having the search/app drawrr on the top won’t work me, especially with these stupid large phone everyone makes. (I’m guessing theres a way to change it, but I didnt get that far)
The ultimate reason its not for me is how widgets are a scrolling thing. It’s a different idea, but I like the widgets on my home screen where I can passively see them.
If there’s a way to change that, I didnt see it. I didn’t even find a way to get rid of the big clock at the bottom.
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.
Honestly, Google Keep notes. Trilium server runs as a UWA on Android but it’s pretty ass. And things like Obsidian are way too much for something me and my (non-technical) SO use to share notes
Quillpad. It looks and feels like Keep, but sync to nextcloud
X2. Great note-taking app.
Agreed. Plenty of notes apps; none with decent collaboration features.
Whatsapp. I know signal, simplex, matrix, (a billion other things), etc exist that are much better, but where I live, no one uses them, for context, basically everyone, like if you have a phone, you use whatsapp, some government things even happen through whatsapp bots, when people say the word message here, they mean whatsapp. There are about 20-30% (among younger folks) who use telegram, but that is mostly for easier piracy, and larger file sharing (before whatsapp allowed 2 GiB, now they do it habitually). My mom has about a 1000 contacts, and less than 10 of them actually use signal (there are many more who signed up(there was another thing, basically when elon said “just use signal”))
At this point it is not worth getting everyone to switch, the best i have done, is just reducing the number people i communicate with (on whatsapp), and try to just meet in person
signal has proprietary blobs, you want Molly-FOSS
I personally do not use them anything else now, i do have element installed, but when you have no one to talk to, you might as well write messages in a notepad
Obsidian
Logseq
Android Auto
Bank clients. Taxi aggregator clients.
Strava, komoot and a calorie tracker that’s actually decent
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).
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.
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.
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.
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 operation 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
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 open source 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 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.
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.
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.
