Recommend me some Quality of Life Android applications : opensource

[–] [email protected] 61 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (16 children)

Audile: offline, trackerless music recognition.
Keepassdx + Heliboard: both excellent apps in their own right that create a smoother experience of mundane phone use, but they also integrate rather well together and Heliboard will often pop Keepassdx in to its suggestion bar when you enter a log in page. It's been really nice for me.
FUTO voice input: speech to text for those who don't want to use Google speech services. Frankly, the FUTO app works better than googles app anyways, it always handles grammar correctly as long as you speak relatively clearly, and integrates with Heliboard nicely.
Tailscale: for those who need VPN access to their other devices.
Thunder : a Lemmy client with compatibility with Lemmy's recent server side changes and also has a decent UI/UX
tasks.org: fantastic, customizable to do app with various syncing options.
Magic Earth: privacy respecting maps/directions for those who don't want google maps. (NOTE: closed source. Here is the privacy policy, terms of use and description of their business model at the bottom of their FAQ)
Myne: e-book downloader.
Markdownr: convert webpages to markdown. Great option for mobile, if I'm on desktop I use the Joplin web clipper plug in for Firefox.

Seconding Newpipe, excellent app.

EDIT: added links to the terms, policies and FAQ of Magic Earth, as it is not open source.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I have been using FlorisBoard for a while now, and had no idea about Heliboard! I saw the rename but didn't really pay any mind to what the app was. I liked Florisboard well enough but it was laggy and unresponsive with no predictions, so I made a ton of typos

Will definitely be giving Heliboard a run

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

That was exactly my experience with Florisboard too. It has tons of potential, but I couldn't ever quite feel fluid with my typing on it. It was a relief to see Openboard get forked.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Re FUTO: how do you feel about their license? I’ve seen some drama around it. Doesn’t give me the warm fuzzies either. Nice list, btw.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Thanks! Glad to share.

I'm not super sharp on the legalese of licensing so I may be missing something important, but the license for the voice input app seems to be pretty straightforward to me. It does retain more control over the source code than true open source licenses generally do, but that doesn't bother me too much personally, provided the respect for privacy and user rights is there. I live more on the world of privacy policies and TOS since I don't code anything beyond a few shell scripts on my desktop.

I should have made a note on my list that both FUTO voice and Magic Earth are not fully FLOSS, just privacy respecting. I'm not surprised there has been some drama though with it not being fully FLOSS. Along with that, one of the companies employees, Louis Rossman, is a YouTuber and has somewhat of a polarizing personality 😄.

I think overall I do generally get a good feeling from the company and the way this app has been functioning. The privacy policy is just about as clean as I think you could get it a speech to text app. Mostly though, it's a lesser of two evils for me, as this is really the only option aside from Google speech to text that I've found. It fills a pretty niche spot on mobile devices right now.

Edit: checked out the FUTO temporary license

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (3 children)

I love tasks.org on Android but God I wish they'd add some NLP to parse out times. That's the one thing I miss from other apps. IIRC The issue in GitHub basically says that there isn't an easy library to do it with right now.

It's so annoying to me that I'm considering trying to make a server side app to do this. Just pull the caldav and parse the titles and set the due date. Can't be that hard right?

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Magic Earth is closed source

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

That's correct. I didn't notice the c/opensource that this post came from, disregard that entry if you're a %100 FLOSS user. I'm still happy to recommend it in general though. It's privacy respecting as far as I am able to verify by their policies and TOS, and it has been a huge quality of life improvement for me on mobile. Hopefully organic maps or other mobile clients for OsmAnd continue to progress 🍻

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I just installed Heliboard but nothing seem to have changed? I still need to switch to Magikeyboard for login anyway. Am I doing something wrong?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

Interesting, it just started working automatically for me. I dont know exactly what combo of settings it might be, but try:

Go to Heliboard settings > Text Correction > suggestions. Then toggle on "show correction suggestions," "personalized suggestion" and "next word suggestions." Those are the ones I have on.
Go to Keepassdx setting > Form Filling. Make sure "set default autofill service" is toggled on. Then go in to "autofill settings" and toggle on "inline suggestions." I think this is probably the issue.
Make sure Keepassdx is set as your default autofill service in android settings Settings > Passwords and accounts. You should see Keepassdx listed there as the form autofilling option.

Let me know how it goes.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

+1 for Heliboard and KeepassDX. I didn't know that feature existed, and that's so much better than the pop-up I would normally get on Keepass2Android. Switched and happy

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Image Toolbox

Basically anything you could ever want to do with an image, you can do with this app.
Crop, rotate, resize, compress, draw, stitch, apply filter, remove background, watermark, OCR, remove EXIF, pick color, generate palette, turn into PDF, turn into GIF, it's a lot.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago

Official page for the Obtainium enjoyers

[–] [email protected] 27 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Gadgetbridge - If you have compatible fitness/smart watch. keeps data local
OpenTracks - Tracking your run/walk/hikes. keeps data local
Organic Maps - Offline Maps and navigation
Feeder - RSS reader
Syncthing-fork -Syncing files across devices
mpv-android - Fast no frills video player.

All available on F-Droid

[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Syncthing-fork is a must for battery life. You can get it to sync for only X minutes per hour.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (2 children)

It also helps a lot if you set the IP/domain manually so it doesn't always have to talk to the relay first.

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

Antenna Pod: Hands down the best podcast app, closed and open source alike

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

The app is perfect.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 9 months ago (1 children)

The Power Off button gives a great quality of life experience.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago

KeePassDX (and its associated keyboard, Magikeyboard)

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago (4 children)

Which qualities would you like to improve?

I use a regular Pixel 6 pro, but there are a few things I keep around to improve the q.o.l. for using android itself.

Nova launcher to simplify things a bit and give me more search engine options
Firefox as my default browser with ad blocking add-ons to maintain some sanity
Solid Explorer to do file system stuff

Built in stuff:

Bedtime mode is a nice reminder to stop and go to bed
Focus mode is nice to stop casual social app usage according to a schedule
Flip to Shhh is great for... shushing. When flipped.
Do Not Disturb is my default mode. Only to be turned off when I'm actively awaiting interaction.
Notifications turned off for almost everything, always.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Do you know that nova got sketchy?

https://www.reddit.com/r/androidapps/comments/w3fnxr/nova_launcher_acquisition_by_branch_from_a_former/

[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago

Didn't Solid get sketchy too? I remember feeling obligated to migrate to Material Files.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I did not! Thank you!

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

You can remove internet access so you don't give your data.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Notifications turned off for almost everything, always.

Best QoL feature IMHO. My husband and bestie can get through with calls, everyone else gets called back.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

Nova Launcher and Solid Explorer are both closed source

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

Are you me? That's such a similar setup.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago (2 children)

blokada, dailyyou, antennapod, feeder, ntfy.sh, geometric weather, openboard :3

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago (2 children)

The Openboard fork just renamed itself to Heliboard. Great app.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

I think the new version broke multilingual autocorrect, or at least I don't get any suggestions for my secondary language. That's really the main thing that sold me on the fork originally since other FOSS keyboards suck at this, so I hope it gets fixed soon.

EDIT: Nevermind, either reinstalling or switching to French as primary and English as the secondary fixed it. Glad I didn't bother opening an issue on GitHub :P

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

I think Geometric weather is abandoned but Breezy Weather is a newer fork that's maintained. I recommend it!

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

p!n will pin a note to the notification tray for a set amount of time.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

Fossify phone bundle, phone, contacts, messages, files, gallery. :B

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Better Open With: because recent Android versions forcing you to just select one app to open each type of link sucks balls. With this, you can go vack to the way it was before - having a choice of app every time you tap a link. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.aboutmycode.betteropenwith

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

I like URLCheck better, the graphics isn't that nice but it works like a charm and you can set it to get rid of amp, redirect, anything you can script for basically

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

Most of mine relate to my home network/server/services. Like Wireguard, connectbot, netanalyzer.

But outside of that, KDE Connect/GSconnect for phone to desktop stuff.

Carrion is a recent add. Additional spam call filtering.

Also still using the f-droid versions of the Simple apps suite.

Clipeus is also nice for purging your clipboard.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Hey, maybe that will be useful: github.com/Psyhackological/AAA

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Wow, that's a gold mine! 😃

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

Glad you like it! You can help. I try to maintain it and add more apps in my free time 😉

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

Simple Solitaire Collection from F-Droid: https://f-droid.org/packages/de.tobiasbielefeld.solitaire/

It's super soothing.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

https://github.com/TrackerControl/tracker-control-android

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Trackercontrol, obtainium, openboard, and newpipe

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Obtainium
Note calendar
Newpipe or Pipepipe

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

Tubular is newpipe with sponsor block and return dislklike, a continuation of newpipe x sponsorblock

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