Android @lemmy.world sunglocto @lemmy.zip 1y ago

Open-source apps are consistently better than the average closed source app on the playstore (opinion)

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.

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Many are functionally better and of course don't have any ads, but often look utterly terrible, unfortunately.
- If it was just looks. Usually the UX is simply not very good. We need more designers in the FOSS space.
- Yup. This is the exact problem I have with them. Most apps look kind of outdated, finding one with nice UI/UX is like finding gold.
- It's true, any developer in any space knows that core functionality is often built quickly, while refinement and beautification can swallow up enormous amounts of time.
  
  Combined with my experience being that the dev guy and the UI/design guy are rarely the same person, and the former is way more inclined to create things for fun and give them away.
One is designed to be a tool and actually used by a dev made out of passion. The other is a product that doesn't trust you with their source and expects you to trust them back. Nor do you have a say in the development or any undesired features that may be added.
- Well put
F-droid is also my preferred source of apps. But the search function is quite bad. I often search the repository from the website on my PC, to find that is in there and then look for apps with exact names on the F-droid app.
Getting your app published on Google Play is fairly easy. You basically just upload an APK and with how little Google reviews apps, you can get almost anything published. F-Droid on the other hand has very strict standards (which is a good thing). Since I published an app myself on F-Droid, I can tell you that fulfilling those standards does take a lot of effort, and thus a lot of love from the developer.

This creates a filter: If you care enough about your project to go the extra mile to fulfil the F-Droid requirements, you probably also care about making a good product. If you don't, you also won't be motivated enough to publish on F-Droid. There are countless open-source projects which sort-of work but are left behind, usually because it was someone's side-project. This is ok as well, because it's free time that most people are spending on Open-Source projects, but as a result, most open-source projects are actually not very mature. They just never make it onto F-Droid and don't go viral.
Nothing except FOSS apps will get installed on my phone. With Exodus Privacy you can check your Playstore apps for trackers. Sometimes sickening how much shit gets installed with an app. Do it then switch to FOSS.
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.
  
  Breezy Weather is an active fork of Geometric Weather (the latter is abandoned).
  
  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.
  
  I loved Infinity. Shame they aren't moving it to Lemmy, and instead they're making it a subscription.
- 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.
- Unless open camera has improved dramatically, the GrapheneOS camera app is far better.
For bonus points, you can use fdroidcl to reinstall your fdroid apps from a list when you reset your phone!
Agree with this totally. The near lack of trackers, disclosure of any that are in apps, no ads, and easy access to code for bug reporting or fixing makes fdroid apps tons better.
Definitely check out Obtanium if using apps from GitHub.
Interesting. I've never explored alternative app stores for Android, usually being happy with those I found through Google. Thanks for the heads up, I'm going to have to investigate :D
Because of this thread, I found out there is an app to download directly from soulseek to your phone! Awesome.
As someone that is very new to FOSS, especially on mobile, it sounds like F-Droid is a Play Store replacement. Where can I download that safely?
- I personally use Droidify. It's an f-droid client.
  
  Yeah I use Droid-ify too. Reasons why is that it looks much better than the stock F-Droid client and is also much newer. Of course I still have the original client just in case but droidify is just better overall
- I would guess the safest way would be through the project side: https://f-droid.org/
- Other commenters recommended droidify, I personally like Neo Store. Both are good options!
- Aside from the site which others have linked to go further you could also verify with the signing keys to make sure the apk is indeed one from f-droid
  
  https://f-droid.org/en/docs/Release_Channels_and_Signing_Keys/
Totally agree. A lot of FOSS apps have Material You design and they are smooth since they don't have any sort of ads or tracker
Ads and trackers add a level of complexity and with it all types of bugs.
I've been on iOS for 4 months. These are the things that make me miss android. My iphone got stolen from hand last week so I had an opportunity to go back to android (and save a ton of money) but decided to continue to ride it out on iphone for a bit. I should stop looking at android stuff so I don't get too jealous.

Is there any Foss stuff on iOS without jailbreak?
- I guess you can use AltStore. I heard you have to renew the apps every 7 days, though

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