6d ago

What app is so useful, you can’t believe it’s free?

440 comments

Wikipedia. Not an app but still deserves a mention.

uBlock Origin leading the pack by at least a furlong.

OBS, and Blender. Two industry shaping software solutions that ere fully open source and free.

The Dialer.
Comes with every phone
10+ digit number instantly connects you with millions of people, services, and institutions
3 digits connects you with life-saving emergency support
Very low-latency voice support
High quality audio (most of the time)
No ads
No obnoxious UI
All kidding aside, I'm routinely astounded at how we have yet to top the ease and utility of old-fashioned phone service.

VLC is a big one for me.
- some new weird video format opens windows stock media player because it's not yet associated with vlc
  "Hey.. it looks like your going to have to buy a codec..."
  manually open in vlc where it runs seemlessly
  
  I'll take "things that haven't happened to me in years for a dollar Alex".
  
  People buy codecs?
- +1 VLC will dutifully try to play even corrupted to hell files that any other media player would just fail with some form of "can't play, file is corrupt"
- VLC just managed to get some newer video files to play for me on a 10 year old tablet that wouldn't play them with it's included video player. It was also one of the only apps on the play store that would still work on that old tablet as well. It's been my go-to video player for years now, terrific software 🥂
- VLC is pretty great. I would say IINA is at least a close second on Mac. Haven’t had a problem playing anything in it yet.
  
  VLC runs great on Mac and Android as well
  
  Yeah I personally prefer IINA on the Mac because of how native the interface is. Neither VLC or IINA has had trouble paying any video files I have.
- Wasn't there some big thing where they tried to buy it and the person that made it was just like "nah"
- I agree that it's cool and all, but I just really don't like VLC. It's ugly, bad UX and misses some major features. I love other similar and also free ones thoigh, like PotPlayer, MPC and MPV.
- It won't keep track of my place in a Playlist to resume so I trashed it.

I still can't get used to calling programs apps

Wikipedia
- Don’t forget to donate!
  
  But then it's not free anymore /s
- That reminds me, I should donate
- Wikipedia
  app
  Reee
  
  To be fair, they have an app

Librewolf, FFmpeg, Vim, Wine

Linux

Home Assistant, not only an App but it changed the way i look at IoT/Smarthome and in that way it brings me a lot of comfort.

Blender, Gimp, Inkscape, OBS (open broadcast software), Linux distros of various sorts, openHAB, LibreOffice, Firefox (and plugins like uBlock), PiHole, VirtualBox, Notepad++, Paint.NET, VLC, 7-Zip, FileZilla…
I’m sure there’s more.
- Gimp is a bit of a stretch.
  I've used it a lot, but unlike most of the others on this list, the commercial product (Photoshop) is so much better that I'm willing to shell out the monthly fee to use it over Gimp.
  
  Back when Photoshop was $300 (600 todays money) It was fine for non-professional work.
  It could use a little UI finesse, a content aware fill without plugins, and a regular human usable macroining system.
  But for 90% of non-professional work clone, dodge, smudge, burn, masking and curves are perfectly serviceable.
  
  I’ve found a nice workflow in gimp to touch my photos. It works wonderfully
  
  I’m not sure what field you’re in and photoshop certainly is the standard but Affinity has been great for my needs and is pay once if you’re looking to avoid SAAS

New pipe, I didn't see anyone mentioned it
Besides, I use Linux, Organic maps, Signal, VLC, KDE on daily basis and THANK YOU good people on internet for making my life happier!

Organic Maps. After switching to graphene, I quickly found plenty of apps replacing the "defaults" I had on stock android, however, a good app for maps was impossible to find until I stumbled over that one. Great UI, local maps, even has a navigation feature. Completely replaces google maps for me.

7zip
- I haven't used windows in about 15 years on my personal machines but see 7zip referenced everywhere...why is it so popular? Can windows 10/11 or whatever we're on now not compress/extract most things itself or do people prefer it for some reason (nice interface etc)?
  I'm always amazed when I'm following a tutorial written for windows and it says "download and install 7zip, then extract the file using 7zip". I just right click the file and extract it...
  
  Windows only recently got support for 7z and RAR. For the several decades before that, it supported neither.
  
  Windows can do that, but opens archives as folders and will run executables by extracting them to a temp folder without dependencies. And the unpack dialogue is cumbersome, with 7zip you get a simple right click -> extract here / to folder dialogue, that somehow still is too much to ask of the main OS.
- WinRAR anyone ? 🤭
  
  What do you mean? I paid \s

Proton. Literally makes any of the big linuxes into the streamos people are waiting for

Fucking entire Fedivere with No ads.

Get outta here you Hedge Fund Manager! Leave our apps alone!!

Libre Office

LocalSend, Immich, Signal, Aurora store, Radio Garden, Gray Jay, yt-dlp, and Bitwarden just to name a few

Practically every single FOSS application I use is highly useful to me, and of course, free, so I'll just list them all here.
Immich - A full-featured replacement for Google Photos, has a sleek UI, face detection, albums, a timeline, etc.
Paperless-ngx - Document management system, saves me a ton of paper hoarding, and makes everything easily searchable with OCR.
Syncthing - Simple file synchronization between my devices, on my terms. Doesn't share data with big tech companies about my files, and hooks up extremely fast P2P connections that beat cloud-based services by a long shot.
Metube & Seal - Simple interfaces for downloading with yt-dlp, can download from YouTube, but also many other sites. Doesn't spam you with popup ads or junk redirects like those "youtube downloader" type sites. Seal is my favorite of the two, but is only on Android.
Image Toolbox - Insanely feature-packed app for doing practically anything you could want to an image. Converting formats, clearing EXIF data, removing backgrounds, feature-packed editing, OCR, convert to SVG, create color palettes, converting PDFs to images, decode and encode Base64 to and from images, extract frames from gifs, encrypt & decrypt files, make zip files, and a lot more. All local.
Rustdesk - No-nonsense remote desktop, tons of features, simple file transfer, cross-platform compatibility, and P2P communication without needing a third party server if you so choose.
LibreOffice - Essentially everything you'd get with Office 365 (e.g. Word, Excel, PowerPoint) but without the $150 price point. Compatible with the same file formats, and has the same functionality.
Cashew - Feature rich financial app for budgeting, tracking purchases, saving for goals, etc. Doesn't have automatic import, but I find that manually putting every transaction in keeps me aware of my spending much better than before, so for me it's quite worth it. Install directly from the APK, or use on web though. The version on the app stores has some features locked behind a paywall.
Linkwarden - Bookmark manager with cross-platform support, a web interface, automatic tagging, automatic archiving of any saved links in multiple formats, collaborative sharing capabilities, and more. It's free, but you can also pay $3/mo if you want them to host it for you.
Edit: And Umbrel (on Raspberry Pi) if you want to host things more easily. Basically just a much more hands-off, user-friendly docker for people who don't want to tinker as much.
Edit 2: Non-FOSS, but Obsidian is the best note taking app I've ever used. Great selection of community-made plugins (which are FOSS) for additional functionality, and all notes are in standard cross-software-compatible Markdown. No locked-in proprietary formats.
- I can suggest LogSeq as a nice alternative for Obsidian. Notes are all in Markdown too!
  
  It's good, but it does not allow for a free file structure. Used it for months but now back to obsidian. Also plugins
- Came here to recommend those first two exactly
- Some of your data flows through Syncthing servers (but I agree that's a great product, I use it myself) LibreOffice works for entry-level users, but it does not have the same functionality as MSOffice. And the UI sucks as much as MSOffice.
- Syncthing is awesome for home devices backups like phone pictures and videos and computer documents that can be version controlled. I also use Local Send app to share files between phones and computers in the house.
- You can buy office separately these days again. Not sure if Libreoffice is feature complete these days, but last time I tried it, it was missing a lot of the more advanced featureslike Solver/Powerquery/certain advanced formulas.
  I recommend it for everybody and if it is not for you, you wil realise it in a couple of minutes of working with it if you are a oower user
- Cashew - Feature rich financial app
  How does Cashew compare to GnuCash?
- Nice I'll definately check those out. For office I use OnlyOffice
- I use near the same stuff. But I don't like these all-in-one centers like umbrel and Casa. I simply use dockge.
  And happy cake day.
- Great list, post saved

firefox
considering the big monopoly of chrome based is not really free, it's paid by google or microsoft mining user data
- In fairness, Firefox is also paid for by Google.
- Firefox gets like 90% of its funding from Google for making Google the default search.
  
  That's funny, that's the first thing I change when I set it up on a new device.
- Yes, google pay for being the default search engine, but that doesn't mean they collect your information. And even better, there are also Firefox forks security oriented.

Organic Maps
- Organic maps is great bit I wish it had real time traffic data. For that reason I normally use magic earth instead.
  
  Thank you very much for pointing out that app exists
  
  Also on iOS—looks promising
  https://apps.apple.com/us/app/magic-earth-navigation-maps/id1007331679
- Can you provide a bit of info on it? What is it for and how does it stand out among the other apps or programs?
  
  It's a beautiful, FOSS, offline/local Google maps-like app for Android that uses Open Street Map data.
  There are plenty of other offline/local map apps, some paid, some free, but they are nowhere near as polished.
  https://f-droid.org/en/packages/app.organicmaps/
- Organic maps is so good
- there's been many a time i've been out in the middle of nowhere with a friend or family member and google maps stops working on their phone, and i get to pull out OM and save the day :^)

Krita. I had a uni licence for Photoshop for years, even took a Photoshop course but still kept using Krita. It has an intuitive UI and all the tools I'll ever need.
RStudio+R is way better than any of its proprietary alternatives.
Blender. I'm no 3D modling expert but it does everything I as a hobbyist want to do with it and so much more. Nowadays, the UI is pretty decent, too.
Finally, the Lagrange browser is really good. The gemini protocol is kinda niche though, but if you're interested it's unreasonably pretty, well optimized and has a great UX. The guy who maintains it really puts his heart and soul into it.
- The fact that you put those examples together with this Lagrange browser made me curious enough to check it, I had never heard of Gemini protocol before. So, simply put, thank you for sharing about this, I'm going to be installing Lagrange and start checking out geminispace.
  
  Cool! Every once in a while, I open the browser and check what's going on in the gemini://midnight.pub
  
  It's a lot of fun. It only took me a couple of hours to figure out how to make a "site".
  gemini://motion.chrisco.me
  Our local community is getting into it.
- Was not aware about the Gemini protocol so thank you for pointing that out!
- Freaking LOVE Lagrange, super glad to see it mentioned here
- shit bruh, never knew there are proprietary R IDEs.
  
  I mean spss and stata are Rstudio+R alternatives

Can't believe no one has mentioned Home Assistant. Automation engine for home and have local control over almost everything "smart" at home.
- You got a link to that? It has a pretty generic name so I want to make sure I look up the right product. 😅
  This one? https://www.home-assistant.io/
  
  Yeah that one
- Home Assistant is awesome! It's the only way to control your house without giving out all your data to Amazon, Google or apple.

Voyager.
- Can you provide a bit of info on it? What is it for and how does it stand out among the other apps or programs?
  
  Lemmy mobile client
  
  Check out !voyagerapp@lemmy.world.
  It’s a fantastic Lemmy client for mobile, and the devs are quite active and responsive.
  e: link format
- Up. Sent from Voyager.
  That reminds me to send them a few bucks anyway, done ✅
- It’s my favorite client I’ve been using since it was a web app
  
  Have you tried phtn.app? It's gorgeous.
- I like the mlem testflight and arctic for iphone, mlem sometimes cant display an image tho

Linux.
At least $100 per system, if not more.
ZFS
- Yeah man zfs Same with snapraid and mergerfs

Blender

Godot
I cant believe it has a better user experience than unity, an app that has a 412 USD/month paid plan
- I was waiting for that.
- Thanks, checking this out.
  
  One story that I should write down because I always tell it when discussing Godot since it's a great example of why Godot is better than other engines is that a while back I was doing a single player game for a game jam, because I was testing it with multiple controllers I wanted that it would pick any controller (it's a single player game after all, no one cares which controller I'm using) and was annoyed at the fact that every game engine requires you to create mapping for all controllers individually to do this, e.g. "controller 1 button A", "controller 2 button A", etc. So I went into the code for Godot and added a couple of lines that allowed me to create a mapping for all controllers, i.e. "Any controller Button A". This felt so useful that I wondered why no engine has it, so I submitted a PR and last I checked Godot is still the only engine that allows for "any controller" style mapping.

YouTube clients like NewPipe

KiCad. GNU Linux. Blender. Gqrx. Rclone. Syncthing

Vim. Every computer I've owned since the early 1990s has had some version of Vi on it.
- Or Emacs, if you want a full operating system as your text editor!
- I've grown to hate vi as I'm building an Ubuntu server, but it's begrudgingly better than the other text editors I've dealt with so far

Adding the following that i have not seen mentioned yet:
Docker - I literally run most of my server programs with docker now. Home Assistant, Jellyfin, and many others.
Tiny Media Manager that I use to scraper and organize my media library
Tiny Tiny RSS to combine my news sites into one aggregator. I actually saw this post on it since Lemmy has RSS feeds!
Openwrt I run as my home router.
I2P but it's still pretty clunky.
Nomachine I use as a remote desktop client.
RocketDock I still use on my windows desktop after windows removed the programs toolbar.
ImageJ/Fiji I use for image processing, it's from the NIH, with a bunch of Java plugins.
Gluetun I use to run my vpn client
Kodi for multimedia

Linux, Firefox, virtualization, Blender, KDE Plasma, ffmpeg, Krita, Inkscape, yt-dlp, Godot, programming language toolchains
- blender for sure, its amazing, especially when every comparable software is an expensive subscription
- add Graphite to the list
  
  woah, ive never heard of this one. it looks awesome. thanks for sharing!!
- Also got back into 2d after many years, didn't want to pirate illustrator, tried inkscape and its all ill ever need

SSH.
Alternatively, Postgres.
- Came for these, leaving satisfied.

Signal. Highly secure communication. No ads. Easy to use.

I think Blender is a very honorable mention, especially since the team that makes the software has also used it to make some really impressive short films, such as Big Buck Bunny. Who knows, maybe some indie studio can use it to make some truly wonderful stuff (and I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case).
- Blender is widely used in many industries. digital images, movies, TV series, games, marketing material, and many more.
  There are most definitely studios (indie and corporate) doing cool stuff in blender
  
  This is why Blender is truly the best of us.
- "everything everywhere all at once" was made largely in Blender I think, it's the most popular film from a studio using Blender that I know of
- You'd be surprised how many animations on youtube (done by small creators are done in Blender ;)
  
  I would guess a lot.

A bit more niche, is Weasis - Dicom Browser for medical images. Alternative is also ImageJ which is used a lot in for scans too.

OrganicMaps, all the trails I've been to so far in the US are available for offline navigation. No need to precache via gmaps and pray it won't get deleted
Edit: OpenStreetMap which powers this is what AllTrails uses, but I'm not sure if they contribute back or not

7 zip, VLC, Paint.net, proxmox, home assistant

Jellyfin.

Traccar - a GPS tracker.
It tracks devices around on a map and records stats about them. Used by fleet managers to monitor thousands of vehicles simultaneous, and also people like me with just two. The interface is a little quirky, but otherwise it's a very solid and capable program. It shows a web map with live positions of the devices, battery state, speed, direction and other datapoints.
My wife and I like to know where the other is because we both do dangerous shit solo. (She horseriding, me motorbiking, and we've both got health conditions). I get notifications when she enters any number of geofences, and can see where she is at any time - and vice versa. This has eased anxiety for both of us.
Initially we used Life360 which is a nice and easy app to use. Then we found out that they sell your information to actively work against you. Not just basic stuff for advertising, but your driving habits, speed, style, accelleration rates - to car insurance companies so they can raise your policy costs, or potentially deny your claim entirely. (Just one reference but there's heaps more)
So we went self-hosted. Traccar is free and I keep our information private. Install a small app on your phone and register it, and done. Or it integrates with dozens of commercial and open source tracking systems.
Disclaimer - not involved with the project, just a user and a fan.
(Just noticed my wife's left her phone behind when she went off riding... I guess no system's perfect!)
- Neat!
  One of my few remaining Google dependencies is maps and timeline. I just like having that data somewhere and most of the FOSS stuff I've seen previously is piecemeal at best. Will have to play with this.
  
  Yay, I'm not the only one!
  When was the last time we went to Disney? Wait let me open my timeline.
  Hell, I don't even need it to be as fancy as Google maps. Just give me dots on a map and let me filter by date.

Off the top of my head from daily use;
Borg backup, powerful backup software for self-hosted oriented users or enterprise automation.
proxmox, hypervisor that is performant and easy to setup for simple and complex virtualization needs.
bitwarden (combined with vaultwarden self-host), password management, secrets management, and available on basically all platforms and browsers. Self hosting your vault gives you peace of mind over who has your most sensitive data.
obsidian, a great notes app with polished cross platform applications that don’t do any funky proprietary storage shenanigans. Files are files and folders are folders.
kate (and most of the KDE suite), premiere Linux desktop environment suitable for customization and all the expected luxuries user would expect from windows or macOS. Kate specifically is a noticeable modern upgrade over notepad++ and rivals VSCode for programmers.
- Could you expand on what you mean by ‘complex virtualization needs’ - I read this phrase sometimes but would appreciate an expert’s perspective 🙏
  
  My only point was to explain that proxmox is great free software because it supports both simple virtualization needs, such as having several different VMs or containers running on one headless system with very little overhead, and complex multi-system setups that include multiple machines running proxmox and clustered together for both reliability and redundancy with distributed services and applications.

DaVinci Resolve is professional grade video editing software that's completely free to use. It lacks some features that the paid version has but this probably doesn't effect the vast majority of casual users.
- Second this. Blackmagic’s DaVinci Resolve is amazing. Probably my favorite video editor (although I usually have to use Adobe Premiere for work). It’s fast, fairly easy to use and probably has everything you need unless you’re doing very specific and high end professional work. It’s also rock solid. The only time I had problems was when I tried to render a few dozen (simple) timelines in one queue on a MacBook with 8GB of memory. Can’t exactly blame DaVinci for crashing on me there.
  And as a bonus: it even runs on Linux. Although kdenlive is also a surprisingly good alternative there.
- And even better, hiring companies for people who are video pros like myself are starting to ask if you're familiar with it. They've realized they don't have to pay Adobe's stupid fees.
- Will always mention its mildly scummy they put user created free addons behind the paid studio version, you can buy some of their equipment and it comes with the studio version to save money (one time fee)
  
  Recent change like 1-2 months ago, if you're still on an older version you wouldn't notice
- The industry should resort to Resolve as a default. Tired of Adobe's bullshit.

Anki flash cards. I use it everyday and commercial programs can't hold a candle to it.
- Unfortunately the iOS app is kinda expensive, $35 CAD. 😵‍💫
- You use it for studying, right?
  
  Are you implying there are other ways to use it? I only know it for studying / learning languages so I'm curious
  
  I use it for learning english and german words
- That would have been my addition to the list too.

and Audacity

Watch duty
AntennaPod
Signal
Shattered Pixel Dungeon

Audacity. How the hell is Audacity free?
- Since the Muse Group has acquired Audacity and its following telemetry/spy-ware case, it has a little bitter aftertaste, there are good alternatives though like Ardour
- Audacity is decent, but Reaper is sooooooooooooooooooooooo much better. Sooooooooooooooooooooooo much. And it's basically free (presuming you're not a business).
  
  and Ardour
- I'm glad Audacity is free, but as an audio (and video) professional, it's a giant pain in the ass.
- I know, right? The audacity!
- Oh, so thats where the phrase "the audacity of it" comes from
  
  The term came long before the program...

7-zip
VLC
Signal
Currency
Handbrake
Fennec (in lieu of Firefox)
Those are the free ones I use very frequently at least, I'm sure there's more.
- I just arrived in Norway and was about to search for a simple currency converter. Handy!
  
  Perfect timing, enjoy! My favorite country, used to live there for a while some years ago.

F-droid is amazing and distributes amazing software that many people already mentioned.
In order to write software, developers need software. I think we should also mention the GNU packages and LLVM.
- Agree. I use it just for GPSLogger - the best tool for logging and sharing comms ever written. So good, Google made it impossible to list on the play store, and F-droid allows me to continue using it easily.

Right now, it's Calibre because I just got a Kobo eBook reader and it's so great to be able to install pretty much any format of book onto my device and convert it if it's a format the device can't use. And even convert it if the book works better in a different format.
- Caliber is truly amazing, but Kobo support is… Odd. I love my Kobo for comics because of the color screen, but uploading .cbz files is an obtuse process. Kobo readers won’t natively read metadata from .cbz files, but you can manually push the metadata to the device’s database. But in order to do that, you need the file to actually be in the database, which doesn’t happen until after you unplug the device.
  So to get a .cbz file working, you need to plug your Kobo in, upload the .cbz file(s), disconnect your Kobo, let it index the file(s), and then hope to god that it actually shows up on the device’s library when you plug it back into your computer so you can manually update the metadata.
  
  Truly odd. The process sounds painful to troubleshoot and find out.
- I was just looking into getting this setup for my partner
  
  I cannot recommend it enough.
- Yeah calibre is amazing, and also integrates anti-drm plugins nicely. Recently I've been reading more and more on my phone so file formats don't matter anymore, but it's still a great software just for managing your ebook archive.
  As a mobile reader I can also really recommend ReadEra (free and ad free), they do have a premium version, but all that adds is synchronize books via cloud storage to other devices and sync reading progress.

GIMP
- And inkscape

Kodi—It can connect to a media source via FTP, so I was able to effortlessly connected it to my online storage to download shows and movies from it to watch on the fly, and on my TV no less. Without that, it'd be a huge pain just to get the file onto my TV.
SmartTube—It's an ad-free YouTube video app for Android TVs, and it has Sponsorblock included. You could say it's YouTube Vanced for Android TVs.
Discord bots—I've setup my own personal Discord server (no other humans allowed in it) and set it up with various bots that do things ranging from posting tweets/ posts from Twitter/ Bluesky to letting me know when specific channels have uploaded a new video on YouTube or gone live on Twitch. I've also got another bot monitoring some RSS feeds.

Home Assistant
- YES! Proprietary home-automation ecosystems are a confusing mishmash of standards, and Matter is only just barely starting to change that. Home Assistant is the glue that sticks them all together. I can have expensive Hue smart bulbs, cheap HomeKit bulbs I found in the clearance bin, Magic Home RGB LED controllers, Sonoff smart switches, a garage door opener connecting via MQTT, and it easily connects to all of them and presents a uniform toggle switch for all of them. I can switch all my (smart) lights on and off from a menu on my GNOME desktop. No fighting with proprietary apps for each different ecosystem. Home Assistant is amazing in how boring and unremarkable it makes the implementation details.

systemd

I miss when apps were specific to phones and we kept desktop computers out of it.

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