Best F-Droid Apps | Hacker News Reader

Best F-Droid Apps

ikkaro.com

69 pointsGedxx38 comments

I highly recommend adding the IzzyOnDroid repository. It's mainly FOSS apps that don't have an f-droid build and new releases are pulled straight from GitHub/GitLab releases, adding over 800 apps to F-Droid.

https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index.php

Some other honorable mentions I haven't seen yet

- Fennec (Firefox) - DAVx5 - Gotify-UP - Joplin - Link Eye - Wormhole William

'Izzy' also keeps a comprehensive OPDS catalog of Public Domain ePubs here;

- English: https://ebooks.qumran.org/opds/?lang=en&pageformat=html - German: https://ebooks.qumran.org/opds/?lang=de&pageformat=html

(if you change 'pageformat=html' into 'pageformat=xml' (or 'atom'), you should be able to connect with any OPDS capable client to it.

If anyone wants to help shepherd Wormhole William through the f-droid submission process, that would be appreciated!

I know this isn't what you asked, but making your own F-Droid repo is relatively straightforward, and since your release process already cooks apks for every release, using the tooling to then push them into a repo would likely not be a lot of additional work, once you've gotten the underlying f-droid repo tooling setup

That process is driven by https://pypi.org/project/fdroidserver/ and then it just needs a local "config.py", keypair, and I use rsync --delete to publish to my repo. You can create a QR code for folks to add the repo which includes the URL and the public-key that signs items in the repo. The gory details are on their website: https://f-droid.org/docs/Setup_an_F-Droid_App_Repo/ and on Mac and Linux (with Linuxbrew) you can "brew install fdroidserver" although that might not work in GitHub Actions

While a discussion of the best F-Droid apps is nice, explaining to people the benefit of never using the Google Play Store would go a long way to increasing the demand for F-Droid apps. Of course... this means making people care about the privacy of their personal data and if that ever became popular then the use of mobile phones would plummet.

There are other benefits of F-Droid, e.g. the lack of malware and adware. You can be sure that anything you install will respect you and behave.

Agreed. My wife's solitaire game from the Play store suddenly started making her (old) phone warm up (around the time Bitcoin started being a buzzword in the mainstream news). Replaced it with one from f-droid with more features and worked well. (Since then she removed it as she didn't want to play it so much.)

this and a sane pipeline for publishing apps.

I came across two which blew my mind away.

1. https://anotherpass.jepfa.de/

2. https://f-droid.org/en/packages/io.oversec.one/

Droid-ify showed me how much I missed out when I was depending only on F-droid and its default repositories.

Thanks HN!

My favorites, in no particular order:

* Nextcloud Synchronization client (File sync) * Syncthing (File sync) * KeepassDX (Keepass app) * Aegis (TOTP Generator) * Element (Matrix client)

* Simple Gallery Pro (Image gallery and editor) * KDE Connect (mobile companion app for connecting to a desktop via KDE Connect) * KOReader (ebook reader) * Antenna Pod (Podcatcher)

My kids also enjoy Shattered Pixel Dungeon (Rogue-like game) and RetroArch (game console emulator)

KDE connect is awesome and is available for Windows, too!

So, these are some good apps for the most part but Binary Eye definitely seems like a better QR scanner. I prefer Password Store for passwords, which can also handle 2FA.

Some others...

    Infinity for Reddit

    Fritter

    Wikipedia

    Telegram FOSS

    Termux

    Tasks.org

    SimpleLogin

    PCAPdroid

    OpenKeychain

    Mullvad VPN

    LBRY

    i2pd

    DuckDuckGo

RedReader is more to my liking: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.quantumbadger.redreader/ (the author is responsive on its subreddit, too: https://old.reddit.com/r/RedReader/ )

I have come to the conclusion that the different apps scratch different itches based on how the user interacts with Reddit (authed, unauthed, pictures, posts, the comments, shudder moderation tasks, ...)

+1 to Binary Eye. Good scanner.

I love that Librera PRO, a fantastic EPUB and PDF reader, is a paid app on Google Play but is free on FDroid.

Other favs:

* Wallabag (read it later) * Markor (Markdown text editor) * FluffyChat (Matrix chat) * BlitzMail (email quick notes to yourself) * Noice (background noise with tons of sounds, great for putting kids to sleep)

>I love that Librera PRO, a fantastic EPUB and PDF reader, is a paid app on Google Play but is free on FDroid.

So is OsmAnd+.

Rather than just Fennec, the FFUpdater app will pull a number of Mozilla applications and keep them current. The list appears to be: Focus, Klar, Lockwise, Beta & Nightly, plus Iceraven, Brave and Vivaldi, and an unGoogled Chromium. It also seems to want to maintain my Bromite.

Unironically the list represents the sad state of good f-droid apps Sure there are plenty more most for niche use-cases but 90% of the apps non-techie people use can not be replaced by f-droid apps. Therefore there is no way to get anyone outside tech to use f-droid.

Some additional good programs are Antenna Pod and Termux.

Some I love:

  * Librera Pro, a featureful, reliable reader for ebooks of many formats, pdfs &c.
  * Chroma Doze, configurable white noise
  * Privacy Browser, lets me turn off both images and javascript, and seems faster sometimes, especially for quick/frequent lookups from bookmarks.
  * IceCatMobile, browser for other sites I leave open for later ongoing reading.
  * Handy News Reader, great RSS news reader once I got used to it; now my favorite by far.
  * NewsBlur, works well for me for a few particular RSS feeds
  * RadioDroid, fabulously wide selection of internet radio in a very convenient app
  * AnkiDroid, extremely useful to learn things ~ permanently
  * Wikipedia
  * VLC
  * Senreta Vortaro, esperanto/english dictionary
  * DroidLife, somewhat interesting Conway's Game of Life app
  * OpenFlood, a curious little game, and way to keep from pocket dialing w/o turning my phone off manually (I had an on/off switch fail)
  * NightScreen, blue light off before bed, but have to turn the schedule feature auto off then back on each time after rebooting, it seems (at least on my phone).  Worth it to me.
  * CPU Stats -- but I *really* wish for something that said *what* was using the most cpu, like top.  Maybe just top, after rooting my next phone.
  * send with FTP and ghost commander, to move files from phone to computer quickly

I wish Gospel Library (content from my church) were on f-droid, then maybe I wouldn't use the Play store at all. They do let people download the code and submit patches, I believe, but I haven't got into details so far.

While these are very useful, I don't trust the stack enough to use my phone for any confidential things like passwords, banking or ssh yet.

Does Librera Pro support notes and highlights? I can only find a very prosaic bookmarking feature.

Do you have other suggestions for ebook readers with notes support. I really like KOReader (the e-reader app), but it has an annoying display bug on my pinholed fullscreen device.

Good question. I only noticed that if I go to the bookmark list, and tap/hold on one of them, it brings up a small dialog where I can enter more text in its name. I don't know of a way to make it obvious while reading that there is a bookmark at that point, but I'm no expert, and haven't really explored the other e-book readers.

The f-droid.org app (and probably web site) refer to https://librera.mobi which might have more info in the FAQ, and there is apparently a link to the author's email (at least in f-droid) who might accept $ for support or added features for all I know (or similar for other app authors) :)

After this thread dies, you're welcome to contact me if there is something else I can attempt answering, via my profile url.

(minor correction: I wigh Gospel Library were on f-droid OR could be side-loaded, short of building it myself.)

* FOSS Browser * VLC * Davx5 * Openkeychain * K9Mail * Tasks (tasks.org) * simple agenda * OrganicMaps * KeepassXC * Tor browser * Antennapod * Markor * Mupdf * Tiny Weather Forecast Germany * Newpipe * Puzzles * Chess * Transportr * KDE connect * Binary eye * habits * Gadgetbridge * Baldphone

dvd - video downloader app powered by yt-dlp: https://f-droid.org/packages/org.yausername.dvd/

RethinkDNS: Fast, private, and safe DNS + Firewall: https://f-droid.org/packages/com.celzero.bravedns/

InviZible Pro - protect your device from dangerous sites, get rid of annoying ads and tracking ...: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/pan.alexander.tordnscrypt.st...

what i am missing is a good audio book and podcast player.

voice is not bad, but it is to opinionated, expecting audio books in a certain directory structure. it also relies on the media information inside the audio file which is often broken.

i need to be able to browse audio files by any folder structure that i make up myself. remembering the position is a must. as well as a way to slowly fast-forward and back by sliding my finger across the screen with 1-second precision when moving slowly.

i also want to track when i listend to a file last so i need some kind of position and last played time stamp somewhere.

currently i am using the non-free mxplayer because it is the only player i found that does all that.

> i need to be able to browse audio files by any folder structure that i make up myself

VLC can do that.

> remembering the position is a must

VLC generally does that, although not in all cases. (If you select a file from the browse activity, it does resume where you previously stopped. If you select the same file from the current playlist - because you selected the containing directory to play as a whole - then it will start over. A reboot of the phone, not sure right now.

> a way to slowly fast-forward and back by sliding my finger across the screen with 1-second precision when moving slowly

VLC does that with video, I think ... I hope it'll become available with audio some time. (Customizable rewind/forward buttons have just recently become available, so generally the UI is making progress currently.)

> i also want to track when i listend to a file last so i need some kind of position and last played time stamp somewhere.

This. I want this too. ... as an augmentation to my diary efforts. I created some git issues for feature requests, but apparently it's not really a priority for most people. Right now VLC has a playback history, but it doesn't show time stamps in the UI. Maybe the info is stored in some sqlite db and could be extracted from there.

I would like an mp3 player that plays music from your (almost any cloud drive) but instead of streaming them, keeps local copies, preferably in mp3 format, and preferably smart enough to not to just copy the entire collection, have configuravle max cache size, etc., cache is literally the mp3s instead of obsfucated.

For quantified self / self tracking, I'd recommend:

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.samco.trackandgraph/

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/de.smasi.tickmate/

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.markuspage.android.atime...

Rather enjoy the Transistor streaming music app. https://f-droid.org/packages/org.y20k.transistor

Some I haven't seen mentioned:

- Ankidroid (flashcards)

- Book Reader (simple ebook reader)

- ccgt (instrument tuner)

- HyperRogue (top-down rogue-like on a non-Euclidean map)

- KISS Launcher (simple homescreen launcher)

- Materialistic (browse Hacker News) - NewPipe (browse YouTube)

I jettisoned Materialistic for Glider and despite its "don't use the reply feature, it's beta!" warning have made several replies successfully using it: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/nl.viter.glider/

The best F-Droid apps aren't in the stock repository but only available once you add a repo to the app. My personal favorite is BitWarden.

In a meta shoutout, I got sick and tired of all the F-Droid client bugs and switched to Foxy Droid which lowered my bloodpressure when dealing with F-Droid repos: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/nya.kitsunyan.foxydroid/

OSMAnd - maps and navigation Fritter - browse Twitter without needing an account AndOTP - 2fa client

Grab Aegis!,

the creator of AndOTP has said it was a funsies project, not solid security.

source?

I'd like to recommend Fast N Fitness as a simple enough app for weight lifting.

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