My Android Ecosystem
Introduction
I consider myself a FOSS
supporter and advocate. As such, my
phone philosophy is not the expected "use what you get". Typically
I would root/ROM my phone but I was nudged to using a locked
bootloader phone (if you don't know what that means, don't worry
about it). So I've had to use/start with the stock ROM. This
page is about what I've done to it in order to de-google as much
as I can and provide a list of FOSS apps I use/play/test.
If you're rather not know the background and just get to the list of apps, here you go.
Cleaning the Phone
First, to clean the phone I used the Universal Android Debloater (UAD). At the moment, I don't have a record of what I removed, but I'll work on that. It should be in the logs of the tool but I've never taken the time to fully list the items I removed. I do know it was mostly the Recommended items. However I did have to leave in {XXXXX.webview?} which is needed by K9-Mail to view emails. Oh, and I also typically leave the file manager for now. I need that to install F-Droid later.
Once UAD got most of the bloat out, I went into the phone's settings and disabled as many bloat-apps as I could. For example, UAD wouldn't remove Google Play or Play Services, but I could disable those in the phone's settings.
Sadly, some bloatware such as Samsung Game Optimzer (I think it's called) can't be removed (UAD tried but it doesn't get pulled) and can't be disabled. For these, I just try and turn off as many "features" as I can, like silencing notifications...basically "get it out of my way".
Once these steps are done, I'm ready to get F-Droid installed.
Installing F-Droid
First, on the computer, I go download the APK directly from F-Droid. I do this on the computer because with UAD, there is no web browser on the phone any more.
Once downloaded, I get the F-Droid.apk onto the phone, usually via drag 'n' drop. I'm on Debian Linux with XFCE so the file manager, Thunar, with gvfs-backends seems to work well. Worst case scenario, I may have to manually get the APK onto an SD card and then insert the SD card into the phone. Your mileage may vary.
Once the APK is on my phone (by some means), I can use the file manager I left during UAD cleaning, and install F-Droid. This usually requires allowing installation from unknown sources for F-Droid.
With F-Droid now installed, it's time to get some core apps installed.
Core Apps
"Core Apps" is a term I use to describe the applications I install before anything in order to protect the phone, do research, ... the necessities.
F-Droid was obviously one of the core apps. Once installed, I do add 2 more repos to it:
- fdroid.IronfoxOSS.org # for Ironfox web browser (see below)
- apt.izzysoft.de for another collection of apps F-Droid doesn't have or doesn't # have later versions of.
The next core app I install is Re-Think DNS + Firewall + VPN. Now I have to explain a little bit here. This tool is great for providing a firewall on the phone (no root needed) via making itself a VPN on the phone. It has, and had, some great features, like using your own DNS server (not theirs) and support for wild-card domains you wanted to allow/deny. For example, you could block *.facebook.com to block all facebook.com domains.
I run my own DNS server so with the phone using my DNS, the wildcard support was awesome! However, as of the version after 0.54a, they only allow this wildcard feature if you use their DNS services. I consider this a window to user data collection so I keep myself on v0.54a. However, to be fair, over time I've found myself using their "isolate" feature more than domain wildcards, so this may change in the future.
The 3
Once Ironfox is installed, I configure ReThink to allow it out to the Internet. Ironfox is the only app, I believe, I allow free access to the Internet through ReThink. All the others I use ReThink's isolate feature (must approve each and every IP address an app wants to access). However, IronFox comes with uBlockOrigin so I use that to help protect it.
Once I have these 3 core apps, I'll install some non-free apps I still use
Non-Free Apps
I doubt anyone will find this section useful, but I include it here for completeness. There are still a couple of apps I "backed up" from long ago or from a stock version of the phone, which still work on a "clean" version. These are them.
- MessageEase Keyboard - Their site is not working at the time of this writing but it's in the Google Play store apparently. I also just noticed there is a "knock off" on F-Droid called Thumb-Key which seems to be similar, but I've not played with it...yet.
- RealCalc* - It's an old version (v3.0.2), but it has a base-conversion feature reminiscent of old-style calculators # where you don't have to "change the mode/screen/menu/etc".
- SiriusXM* - It came with the car and I've kept it since the plan can stream on mobile too. I like the new age instrumental while I work/code/etc. Though, I'm getting fed up with them and am real close to pulling the plug in favor of free Internet # sources.
*Links go to Google Play
Finally, at this point, I can start installing the other tools I use, apps I like, and some I'm not sure of but keep around "just in case".
The Apps
At the time of this writing (20251231-0137) I'm just dumping them here in no particular order. Later I may classify them by category, sort them, who knows...
Also, just because an entry below says it's from "IzzyOnDroid", you can still download via the F-Droid app provided you've added the IzzyOnDroid repo to the F-Droid app's list of repositories.
| App Name | Category | Source | App Store Description | Comment |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Battery Widget | Utility | F-Droid | Simple widget to show the battery power on the home screen. I use this cause my eyes are getting old and the notifcation bar battery status is hard to read without my glasses. | I can't find this on on F-Droid anymore so here is an APK aved off my phone. |
| LibreCamera | Photo | F-Droid | Libre Camera is a free and open source camera app to take pictures and record videos written in Flutter and Dart. | I yanked out the default camera with UAD, so this is one of the alternatives I use. Later you'll find one or two more simply because I'm still playing to see which one I like best. |
| ImapNotes3 | Note Taking | F-Drroid | A free and fast notes editor for Android that allows for synchronization with IMAP servers. | |
| Fossify Calendar | PIM/Calendar | F-Droid | Securely plan, schedule, and set reminders with our private calendar app. | I like the philosophy if the Fossify apps. Some are limited in their nature but get the job done with privacy in mind. |
| Fossify Gallery | Photo | F-Droid | Gallery with Photo editor. No Ads, Open-source, Private. No strings attached. | |
| Fossify File Manager | Utilties | F-Droid | Handy, lightweight, open-source file explorer with essential features. | |
| Lexica | Games | F-Droid | Find as many words as possible on a grid of random letters within a time limit | |
| Simple Solitaire Collection | Games | F-Droid | Solitaire game collection with 17 games | |
| Newpipe | Video | F-Droid | Lightweight YouTube frontend | |
| VLC | Video | F-Droid | The best video and music player. Fast and “just works”, plays any file | |
| Phonograph Plus | Music | F-Droid | A revived classic material designed local music player for Android | |
| Aard 2 | Education | F-Droid | Offline dictionary | Once you understand where/how to get the dictionaries, this is an awesom app! Personally, I have the English dictionary and the Spanish-English one as well. |
| Secret Space Encryptor (SSE) | Privacy | F-Droid | File Encryption, Text Encryption (Messages, Notes, …), Secure Password Manager | I love how I can encrypt entire directories on the SD card. |
| Jigsaw | Games | F-Droid | A Jigsaw Puzzle Game | Let's you select your puzzle size. A little tough on a small screen, but a nice time waster. |
| Tusky | Social Media | F-Droid | A multi account client for the social network Mastodon | Currently missing a few features I wish it had, like quoting and spell checking. |
| Markdown | Utilities | F-Droid | A simple markdown editor | Includes a preview. Thought I'd use this for working on README files on Codeberg, but since CB understands OrgMode, I don't see myself using this one too much. Nevertheless, I keep it around in case I need to test any Markdown. |
| APK Explorer & Editor | Utilities | F-Droid | An open-source APK explorer/Editor & Split APK/App bundle Installer for Android! | This is really handy to dive into the APK packages installed and to get a "backup" of any as well. |
| Bubble | Utilities | F-Droid | Spirit level and ruler. | |
| ConnectBot | Utilities | F-Droid | SSH and local shell client | Ironically, the way my home networks are setup, I really don't use this one. I don&t really have a need to ssh to my home server from my phone and my other systems are on unreachable networks. |
| FTPClient | Utilities | F-Droid | A simple FTP, FTPS and SFTP client for Android | Ironically, the way my home networks are setup, I really don't use this one. |
| Librera FD | Utilities | F-Droid | Book and PDF reader | I've always had bad luck with PDF readers. If anyone knows of a better one on F-Droid, Izzy, or other repo I'm open to trying it out. |
| SMS Backup+ | SMS/Utilities | F-Droid | Backup SMS messages | This is an old app which I can't find even on Google Play. I wanted to backup my SMS messages, but using the default SMS app, only received messages were backed up. This is why I switchted to Fossify Messages. I like this app's ability to have scheduled backups to my IMAP server. I've not found an SMS backup tool on FOSS repos Here is a local copy. |
| Send Reduced Lite | Utilities | F-Droid | Reduce image size | This is a "Share" item to feed an image to and have it reduced in size. I've used this when sending pictures via SMS to family. No sense sending a multi-megabyte file when their screen is small. |
| Scrambled EXIF | Utilities | F-Droid | Remove the metadata from your pictures before sharing them. | This works great with Send Reduced. Share the image to this to remove the EXIF data, then immediately share again to Send Reduced to shrink it, then share a final time to email, SMS, Mastodon, etc. |
| Save Locally | Utilities | F-Droid | Using an app that doesn't allow Saving but allows Sharing? No problem! | This is a nice one. As the description says, some apps allow "Share"ing, but the options are limited. This allows you to save the shared item to your phone's file system. |
| DAVx |
PIM/Calendar | F-Droid | CalDAV/CardDAV Synchronization and Client | This allows me to maintain my contacts/calendar on my own server. No Google garbage. |
| OpenCV Manager | Graphics | {TBD} | So this one was an odd one. Open Note Scanner required this but it downloaded it. If you need/want to download yourself, perhaps start here. | |
| Fossify Keyboard | Utilities | F-Droid | Simple and open-source offline keyboard with emojis | I prefer MessagEase for my keyboard, but this one has a better collection of emojis. However, I've been transitioning to using UnicodePad for emoji selection now. Unfortunately, this keyboard doesn't have "swipe" capability either. I mention this because sometimes I will use the default Samsung keyboard for that purpose. |
| K-9 Mail | F-Droid | Full-featured email client | No, not Thunderbird. I've not been happy with Mozilla's direction of FF or TBird. This is the actual K-9 Mail client at v14 prior to TBird's take-over. It is still available from F-Droid. | |
| Fossify Messages | SMS/Utilities | F-Droid | Open-source and Ad-free SMS/MMS messaging app | As I mentioned, with Samsung's default messaging app, SMS Backup+ was only able to access received messages. Fossify's app provided SMS Backup+ to backup my sent messages as well. This puts a full backup/record onto my IMAP server. |
| Open Note Scanner | Utilities | F-Droid | Scan documents, handwritten notes or arts | Must admit I don't use this much at all. I tried to use it because I have to scan receipts but they are looong receipts. I was looking for a "panoramic" scanner, but this doesn't support that. I've kept it around "just in case" but that's it. |
| Transistor | Music | F-Droid | Transistor is an app for listening to radio stations over the internet. | |
| WiFiAnalyzer | Utilities | F-Droid | Optimize your Wi-Fi network | If you have the ability to assign your WIFI access point&pos;s channel, this is really useful to find a channel with less usage. It will result in better WIFI performance. |
| X11-Basic | Programming | F-Droid | BASIC interpreter | Don&pos;t be fooled, this is not your Commodore BASICv2. It&pos;s much more powerful you&pos;ll probably want the reference guide. However, I&pos;m hoping it is a nice programming environment for simple needs on Android. |
| Tonality | Music | F-Droid | Piano keyboard with scale highlighting | |
| Everest | Games | F-Droid | Mathematical puzzle game | |
| Frodo C64 | Retro | Google Play | This isn't maintained any more. I just keep it around because I won't get it from Google Play. Unfortunately, with newer Android versions, there is no way to load anything into it either. So it's really just nostalgia for me (not even gonna provide a local copy - ping me if you want it). A better alternative is 8-Bit Wonders. Google link if interested: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.ab.c64 | |
| Cirrus | Utilities | F-Droid | Weather and rain radar for any location - worldwide | |
| Fossify Contacts | PIM/Contacts | F-Droid | Manage your contacts privately and efficiently with vCard support | Can be sync'd via DAVx |
| UnicodePad | Utilities | F-Droid | Input every character in Unicode | Great selection of emojis, complete with "Copy" and "Favorites" functions. |
| BinEd | Programming | F-Droid | Editor for binary data (hex viewer/editor) | Haven't used this yet, but no self-respecting hacker goes without a binary/hex editor of some sort. :) |
| Fossify Camera | Photo | F-Droid | Lightweight open-source camera app for quick, easy, and secure photography | |
| Xeonjia | Games | F-Droid | Save the world by solving ice puzzles and defeating enemies! | |
| Peristyle | Utilities | F-Droid | Simple wallpaper manager app with Auto Wallpaper and Multi Folder support. | After cleaning the phone with UAD, there was no more "Set as Wallpaper" options. This app solves that if you want to set your wallpapers. |
| ObscuraCam | Photos | F-Droid | Picture anonymity: Take pictures & blur identities with this privacy camera app | |
| 8-Bit Wonders | Games / Programming | F-Droid | Flexible and easy to use Commodore 8-bit emulation with builtin games. | Has a keyboard to program as well, but difficult to type on. Better get a BT keyboard if you're going to do any real programming on this. |
| P2Play | Videos | F-Droid | Unofficial Peertube client | |
| Alex vs Bus: The Race | Games | F-Droid | A platform runner game in which Alex needs to catch the bus on time | |
| Barcode Scanner | Utlities | F-Droid | An open-source app that allows you to read and generate barcodes. | Most camera apps have barcode sanners now. The ones I use and have listed do not. |
| Emotic | Utlities / Emoticons | F-Droid | Reignite the love for emoticons and more | |
| Rabbit Escape | Games | F-Droid | Lemmings-like puzzle/action game | |
| Fossify Paint | Graphics | F-Droid | Quick, easy and open source drawing app | Just drawing, won't annotate images. Do that in the Fossify Gallery app. |
| c:geo | GPS / Geocaching | Play/Github/F-Droid | FOSS Geocaching app. | I had written this one off a
short while back because when I launched it, it said it
requires Google Play Services. Turned out it was only
because the map provider was set to Google. Changed it to
OpenStreetMap and it works fine again! There is also, now, an F-Droid repo for this. You'll need to add it to F-Droid. (Which I'm going to do right now!) |
| Canvass | Graphics | IzzyOnDroid | Draw and take notes anywhere on your device | |
| Open Video Editor | Video | F-Droid | Open source Android video editor, built with Media3 and Jetpack Compose. | Not nearly has useful as I'd hoped. I can't even lay in an audio track. Have been contemplating removing it. |
| Fossify Music Player | Music | F-Droid | Open-source and Ad-free Music Player with customizable widget & sleep timer | |
| GPS Logger | GPS | IzzyOnDroid | A simple and lightweight app for recording your position and your path | There is one
on F-Droid
as well I've not yet looked at. One of a few apps I'm looking at to track my walks. |
| PDF Doc Scan | Graphics | IzzyOnDroid | PDF document scanner | Haven't had good luck with this one. |
| yetCalc | Utlities | F-Droid | Progressive calculator, converter and much more. | I've been looking for an alternative to RealCalc (non-FOSS) but haven't found it. YetCalc has base conversions but they're not accessed as simply as in RealCalc. |
| Tor Browser | Browser | No Clue | The infamous Tor browser. | It's not in F-Droid or IzzyOnDroid. You can get it from Google Play, but you know by now I won't link to it. I probably got this from the main site but I'm not sure so I don't want to link to anything until I'm sure. |
| Image Toolbox | Graphics | F-Droid | Powerful image editor: crop, filter, convert, resize, compare, and more! | |
| Base64 | Utlities | IzzyOnDroid | Base64 Toolbox is an app to encode and decode base64 easily. | |
| Box Smasher | Games | F-Droid | Shoot balls to smash boxes into the void! | This is a fun time waster. Sadly, there are 24 levels and once you're done...you're done. The author leads us to believe there will be more but I haven't seen any yet. Hint: on level #8, don't shoot right away. |
| Sounds of Rain | Music | No Clue | White noise of rain varieties. | Apparently this was installed from the file manager which means I downloaded it manually from somewhere. Here's a local copy if you're interested. |
| Soft Sound | Music | F-Droid | Play relaxing sounds | |
| Organic Maps: Offline Map & GPS | GPS | F-Droid | Get reliable offline maps with GPS navigation for hiking, cycling, and travel. | One of the apps I'm investigating for tracking walks. |
| Breakout 71 | Games | F-Droid | Break colourful bricks, catch bouncing coins and select powerful upgrades! | |
| Unreal Speccy | Retro | F-Droid | Unreal Speccy Portable - ZX Spectrum Emulator | |
| Unicode Map | Utilities | F-Droid | Copy Unicode characters | Old software for searching unicode characters. |
| Droid Pad | Utilities | F-Droid | Build control interfaces for WebSocket, Bluetooth/LE, MQTT, TCP & UDP protocols. | This is an interesting one. It allows you to create a GUI which will send messages via various protocols in order to trigger an event. For example, I can create a GUI with a few buttons which can send a message to a Perl/CGI on my web server which launches a script to create an alarm, which would then email me upon "times up". |
| Droid64 | Games | GitHub | C64 Emulator | Old software, not real usable but I am C64Whiz, so I keep it around. :) |
| Simple Text Editor | Utilities | F-Droid | This is simple text editor that can help you with editing text files. | I usually use ImapNotes3 for note taking since it stores the notes on my IMAP server. However, sometimes I'll have a text file locally I'll want to view. This app helps with that. (Don't really need it to save a text file locally since in ImapNotes3 I can "share" a note and use the "Save Locally" app. |
| Flutter McSweepy | Games | F-Droid | A simple Minesweeper clone | The single tap to open the square vs long tap to mark as a mine is a PITA. One small flub up and BOOM! |
| Accrescent | App Store | Web Site | A novel Android app store focused on security, privacy, and usability. | I haven't used this one yet since the app itself doesn't give a lot of information about the apps is provides. I've been meaning to check the web site to see if it provides more info about the apps. I'm not interested in installing an app I can't get info on. |
| Simple Frame | Photo | F-Droid | Simple app to display pictures as in a digital frame. | |
| ProgressBars | Utlities | F-Droid | A simple timer / countdown app | Has widgets too. |
| Apple Flinger | Games | F-Droid | Funny single- and multiplayer game - Use a slingshot to shoot with apples | |
| Tux Rider | Games | F-Droid | Downhill racing game | |
| Antimine | Games | F-Droid | A puzzle game where you search for all hidden mines. | Another minesweeper clone. |
| PixelDroid | Photo | F-Droid | Client for Pixelfed, the federated image sharing platform | |
| Translate You | Utilities | F-Droid | Privacy focused translator app built with MD3 | I've tried a few engines. Deepl (Browser) was working then stopped. Now I'm on "MyMemory". Let me know if you've had good luck with another one. |
| osmin | GPS / Navigation | IzzyOnDroid | GPS Navigator On-Road/Off-Road | I have a few apps like this. I'm still trying to wrap my head around them to determine which I like best. |
| Moshidon | Social Media | F-Droid | Mastodon for Android but it's Material You and has more features | TBH, I like Tusky better. But I use this one for "work" just to be sure I don't accidentally cross-post. |
| MakeACopy | Utilities | F-Droid | Privacy-focused document scanner with OCR and PDF export | The OCR feature is what got me to instal this but I've not tried it out too any great extent to form an opinion. |
| Unit Converter Ultimate | Utilities | F-Droid | Convert between units with ease | This is one of a few apps I have for conversion. I hate how some apps will have some conversion in common but most have their own sets. We really don't get an "ultimate" converter. I have yet to find a good FOSS converter app with pretty much everything in there. |
| RGB Tool | Utilities | F-Droid | Get RGB and HEX values of a color | |
| Qonvert | Utilities | F-Droid | Converting rational numbers between different bases and representations | Another attempt at an alternative to base-conversions provided in RealCalc. |
| MGit | Programming | F-Droid | View and interact with git repositories | Thought I might use this to interact with my repos. I have to setup the keys for me to really do that, so I haven't really used this one either. Not sure if I'm going to. |
| Tessel | Games | F-Droid | Place tiles with matching colors to make shapes and fill the board. | |
| Ringdroid | Music | F-Droid | An application for creating your own ringtones. | I remember this app having more features. Basically you can trim MP3s and make them into ring tones. |
| Fossify Voice Recorder | Utilities / Audio | F-Droid | Record anything with this Open-source and Ad-free recorder | I used to use an app called "Record You" but I can't find it any more. This seems to be identical (aside from colors). I'm wondering if Fossify took it over. |
| Fossify Calculator | Utilities | F-Droid | Simple and open-source calculator for quick and easy calculations | Thought it may have base-conversions but no. Why not delete it? It's FOSS, RealCalc is not. Between this calculator and Qonvert I was hoping to get away from RealCalc, but RealCalc is just so damn convenient having everything right there. |
| OSM Tracker | GPS | F-Droid | GPS Track Recorder | Another walk tracker. Guess I should go for more walks to try all these out and decide once and for all. |
| Word Maker | Games | F-Droid | A fun word puzzle game, completely private and offline. | I swear, this game is in F-Droid. The web site can't find it but the app can/does. I love this game. I think it's new so maybe it hasn't made it to the web site yet. There's been like 3 updates in the past few days which means the developer is working on it - which is great! If you like word puzzles, definitely give this one a try. |
| Loops | Social Media | Web Site | The ActivityPub, TikTok alternative. | |
| Block Drop | Games | F-Droid | Free and open source block-stacking puzzle game. Arrange falling shapes to clear | |
| English Whiz | Utilities / Dictionary | IzzyOnDroid | EnglishWhiz is an offline dictionary app that features fast word look-up. | This is v1.0. v1.1 is available on Google Play (which again, I wont't link to or download). v1.0 has one huge problem - where you type the word is a white text box and the text is also white! Futhermore, as you type, the possible list of words overlay on top of your typing! Nevertheless, this seems to be the only app where I can type a word and get suggestions. Aard2 is my preferred dictionary app but I have to spell correctly in order for it to find my word. |