Is there any closed source android app that you wish had a good open source alternative?
Is there any closed source android app that you wish had a good open source alternative?
I'm currently looking to develop an open source app that can help somebody. I'm currently out of ideas, so I'd like to heard if from you guys.
Sorry if it seems to lazy to ask for ideas like that, I just thought that I could do it since the result will be a free app.
It would be a huge undertaking, but a Fitness and Health tracker / aggregator that could replace Google Fit and the likes.
I really can't bear how Google, Apple, Samsung, and all these big companies are the primary holders of our most intimate information. I've put some measures in place to limit who gets what, but it would be a huge boon to be the sole maintainer of my own info.
The problem is that the various apps and devices which report data won't immediately support syncing with a FOSS upstart...
The app I use for grabbing my weight and BMI can only sync with a few other apps. The app I use for calorie and diet tracking can likewise only sync with a few apps. They happen to have Google fit in common, so I use that as an intermediary to transfer weight to the calorie/diet app. All my steps, exercise, and sleep stay in Zepp, separate from them all.
It sure would be nice to have one service/application to rule them all and a secure method of storing one's own personal information without having to give it to the tech companies. Sure, use one of the many cloud services but encrypt all the data so that they can't steal it. Yadda yadda.
One can dream.
Google lens.
I love point and translate. Faster more pin pointed reverse image search is cool too.
Right now im looking for an alternative to the Google Maps Timeline. I know there is OwnTracks but I dont think that everything has to be hosted on a server somewhere (especially when all its saving is a timestamp and a coordinate, its not like that takes up alot of space)
Basically just your own location tracker and then the option to see your own history displayed in a map e.g. where you have been on the 02.july.2019 at 11:50.
Nice question, you've got a lot of answers, most being major projects outside the scope of an individual, still, interesting pain points.
May I suggest you edit your OP with a list of viable options for individual devs or small teams to try ?
I'm sorry, I don't have any specific suggestions for you, but I am wondering: is there no open source app you yourself wish existed because you would need it?
Working on an open source app because some else (and not you) needs it, is not a good way of staying engaged and caring about the solution. Being the user and target of a project yourself is usually a much netter way of caring and proposing something tailored to at least one individual, maybe more.
Of course, if you are looking for a programming exercise, go for it, but then you don't need ideas, you can reimplement something which already exists, perhaps which you like, but in your own way. But if you want to have an impact in the open source, it starts by needing something which you don't really find anywhere and taking matter in your own hands to fix it :) this is not meant to disincentivize you, quite the opposite! I hope you stay attentive to your digital ecosystem to see which holes can be plugged :)
I maintain a private list of ideas I just think of as I go about my day, of things I would like to write/create for myself and while I won't be going through with all of them, I hope to be able to pick up one or several of them whenever I have time. I can through some ideas here, not as a hint that you should do it (I'll probably do them myself regardless), but just to inspire you, maybe:
- I am subscribed to a teachable program which has no app and the program is just static information. I want to pull it all and represent it to me offline, not requiring internet to manage my progress. It is also intended to help me archive what I paid for and not depend on the goodwill of teachables to allow me to continue access the resource.
- an RSS feed manager which uses embeddings to automatically organise the content by topic rather than by source.
- an anki plugin to highlight content in the browser based on words from anki that I have and have not learned, to improve my language learning and reading ability.
I have a few more, but this should give you some hints, I hope! Good luck!
Support for all the hardware so we can quit using garbage Google-provided Android on every single phone instead of just the half-dozen or so phones some of these Free Android builds support. Amazing that I can install Linux on every single freaking configuration of PC that's ever existed with a very tiny amount of systems not having support for all of its hardware even if said hardware has never been freed or even officially documented, but not with phones.
The damn things will still be a privacy nightmare because your cell signal tracks you everywhere you go, but at least we'd have a Free OS for everyone's phone.
Symfonium. Don't get me wrong, I like Finamp, but it just does not come close to the amount of features that Symfonium has.
I posted a similar question a few months ago if you want some more ideas :) (also looking to develop/design an open source app -- hmu if you want to collab on one!)
I can't find an equivalent replacement for Musicolet. There are plenty of open source music players out there for Android that just don't have the little features that Musicolet does. Such as multiple queues, lyric editing, metadata editing, format conversions, stop after the track finishes, easily reorder songs and clear queues, etc.
Any image/video editor in Android. I've been trying Image Toolbox, but sometimes it doesn't work or crashes :(
A nutrition tracker where you can enter what foods you eat into a small database. And then when you eat meals you can check those foods off in order to calculate all of the nutrition facts consumption per day. And it could be expanded even further by adding graphs and reports such as Weekly, Monthly, or Yearly.
Could track Calories, Vitamins, Minerals, and other specific nutrition stats. Most nutrition apps I've seen only track Calories... Or don't have accurate nutrition applied to specific foods as it is generic. Letting the user add the food as a item in a small database would give the user more control of how the stats and reports are calculated.
Could be helpful for some to see their intake and then figure out ways to change it to become healthier.
NZB360
I don't use it much since I've already got it active on the apps I wanted it for, but on Samsung's Galaxy Store there is an app I've never found an alternative to anywhere from my limited searching: Sound Assistant.
On desktop/laptop, turning off individual app/program sounds is super easy, but this is literally the only app I've ever seen that allows you to turn off the sound for individual apps on android. Don't know if other versions of android from other brands or android 14 has that feature natively, but it's a feature I wish was native to all versions of android regardless of which large brand has made their own alterations to android.
A minor problem, though, as I assume most people probably don't give a rats ass about this.
KineStop - After Apple announcef Motion Cues, I went looking on Android because I cannot use my devices in a moving vehicle. KineStop is all I found. I went ahead and bought it because it helps (doesn't completely get rid of motion sickness). I would gladly switch to an open source alternative if one were available.
Make an Android app for Redlib please :)
A delivery tracking app would be great, ideally with Widgets and Material You. On iOS I used to use Deliveries or ParcelTrack, but after switching to Android and primarily using open source software, I couldn't find a good alternative.
Fitbod, a fitness app that monitored my progress and health data and auto generated appropriate workouts taking muscle group fatigue into consideration
Komoot and strava... General route planning and teavkinv software..
There is an IOS app for hot air balloon pilots called "Hot Air". There is a similar app for Android that... Leaves much to be desired.
There's several functions that are needed. First, we need a map. We need to be able to enter waypoints and/or polygons charting landing zones, prohibited zones, targets, etc. we need an easy way to select targets, and our bearing and distance to those targets.
For planning purposes, we need a bearing line that we can place and move on that map. We need to be able to easily drag and drop each end of the line, and get the bearing and distance between the endpoints.
Next, we need track recording. It should record a ground track during flight, preferably with altitude information, and notes about the flight.
Next, a wind map. The wind speed and direction varies considerably by altitude. It needs to record direction and speed as we climb and descend, telling us what altitude has winds favorable for our current target.
Bonus points if we can prepopulate that wind map with data from a "pibal" (pilot balloon; a simple latex party balloon released and tracked with compass and stopwatch before a flight)
Next, coordination with other pilots and ground crews. 3D location sharing between participants; wind map data shared between pilots.
I don't have any idea of how conplicated it would be, but a phone app would be a nice option. The stock dialer that comes with FOSS ROMs is OK functionally, but visually looks like it was from 2010. Plus it's not available through F-droid or other open source app store. Koler is the only serious dialer alternative I've seen, and while it looks nice it has always been super buggy.
Would like to get an effective metadata eraser, this one is pretty good https://f-droid.org/packages/com.jarsilio.android.scrambledeggsif/ but cannot saved to device, that's really awful... If you could get something as strong as this and saved it to device that would be pretty nice
I can't wake up or a similar app.
I would've wanted an alarm clock app with 'tasks' you need to do before turning it off.
Mixplorer ?
If you're interested in something that doesn't even exist, and should be more-or-less straightforward:
Music/podcast app that will accept VST plugins (there are many FOSS ones, as well as non-FOSS ones) so that we can compress/limit the sound range on podcasts while in the car. Or even a built-in compressor/limiter that's based on FOSS compressors.
I was listening to a hysterical podcast episode between three people, but one of mics was way louder than the other two. I had to take it into Pro Tools and fix it myself before listening to it.
There are apps that allow EQ, but none that do actual compression, from what I can tell.
I would really want to have a really good open source SFTP (SSH File Transfer Protocol) app, with good secure key management and excellent transfer performance. So far, I haven't found any such app.
Sailforms Android app!
https://groups.google.com/g/sailforms-users
Use like 12 years for keeping track of lots of personal stuff. It's a generic database / table / forms app that's very powerfull. Buttons, queries, reports, calculated fields etc.
But: the app developer stopped despite a rather enthusiastic community. Now it isn't even on the Play Store anymore and I guess everybody must have an exit strategy.
Uber? What do you use for rides?
SMS Backup & Restore? Unless there is an alternative that I'm missing? Play store link
Xplore file browser
It's trivial to replace the independent pieces of xplore, but it has so many features in one app that I just can't let it go. It's got dual pane file browsing, disk usage chart, smb, ftp, and many other cloud storage connections. It also handles many types of compression.
It's become my main offline music player as well, because it has the simple ability to shuffle a folder of music, which is all I really need.
It can also view installed apps, export them to apk, and view and modify appdata (as non root!).
Visual voicemail
Readably
No RSS reader is quite like it.
Synfonium
Best music player out there.
I'd be happy if Voiply would just work without GMS and could be downloaded from F-droid.
AnyType , AppFlowy, Affine - alternatives to notion LibreSpeed - alternative to Speedtest.net And Penpot - alternative to Figma
I don't have any suggestions. I can't think of any proprietary app good enough that I'd give up control of my computing for. However, consider objective requirements rather than subjective terms like good. What do you use the proprietary app for, why are existing free alternatives not sufficient, and can a free app be made that satisfies those requirements?
It’s not an Android app but ServerCat is the best multi device monitoring/ssh software for mobile that I’ve come across. Sadly none of the alternatives on iOS or Android compare. Totally room for a proper competitor that fits a lot of information in an intuitive and clean ui.
This is not an answer to your question, but I would love if somebody would make InputStick software for platforms other than android if possible
Grid Square Locator
okay, honestly: a dating app yes there are a couple foss ones, but basically no one uses them and their ux is horrible
@federino
I would like to request a feature vor my prefered gallary app Aves.
I would like to have a protocol agnostic tool for Offline files.
I wish to work with my Images storred on a Server at home. It would be nice if I could Sync files with it and descide if an Image should be storred localy or only on server.Storrage agnostic means, that i'm able to use either other saf integrations or been able to etablish a connection inside aves to smb or ssh-ftp.
I miss such an app also for my Linux laptop. Currently, such a way of managing files currently exist only on Windows ( OneDrive, Dropbox)
Clash royale
I would like anything comparable to PopPic on Android, open source or otherwise.
iVoox
QuickCursor