This page is available as an easy-to-read website at https://albertomosconi.github.io/foss-apps.
A collection of great open source applications to replace proprietary ones on Android. Most of these apps are available on FDroid.
I do not own this material, I'm just sharing it because I think it's cool.
- Anime
- App Stores
- Browsers
- Calculators
- Calendars
- Email Clients
- Emulators
- Entertainment
- File Managers
- Games
- Launchers
- Maps
- Media Viewers and Players
- Password Managers
- Productivity
- Programming
- Security and Privacy
- Social Media
- Synchronization
- Texting
- Utilities
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AnYme: Android App for Anime which can sync with MyAnimeList. It features a built in AdBlocker, new releases notifications, shortcuts, recommendations and more.
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[website]
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MoeList: Another unofficial Android MAL(MyAnimeList) client, track your progress in both anime and mangas. See top charts, search, and manage your list.
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[playstore]
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Aurora Droid: An alternative to the default F-Droid app with an intuitive UI and multiple great features, such as a powerful download manager: pause, resume and retry downloading apps, previous releases: enables downloading old releases.
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[f-droid]
[website]
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Aurora Store: An alternate to Google's Play Store, with an elegant design, using Aurora you can download apps, update existing apps, search for apps, get details about in-app trackers, spoof your location and much more.
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[f-droid]
[website]
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F-Droid: An installable catalogue of FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) applications for the Android platform. The client makes it easy to browse, install, and keep track of updates on your device.
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[website]
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Foxy Droid: Unofficial F-Droid client in the style of the classic one. Jump over the lazy dog, manage repositories, and install software quickly. No privileged extension, root installation, or sharing local repositories nearby. It also features fast repository syncing, standard Android components, minimal dependencies and more.
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[f-droid]
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G-Droid: An alternative client app to browse the F-Droid repository. It features reviews and comments for apps, star ratings, upstream star ratings, etc.
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[f-droid]
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Bromite: A Chromium fork with ad blocking and privacy enhancements; take back your browser!
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[website]
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IceRaven: A web browser for Android, based on Mozilla's Fenix version of Firefox. Our goal is to be a close fork of the new Firefox for Android that seeks to provide users with more options, more opportunities to customize (including a broad extension library), and more.
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Kiwi Browser: A fully open-source web browser for Android. Kiwi is based on Chromium. Easily switch to Kiwi without having to painstakingly learn a new interface or break your existing browsing habits. It supports Chrome Extensions, night mode and bottom address bar, as well as performance improvements.
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[playstore]
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Lynket: Android browser app based on Custom Tabs protocol. Lynket utilizes Chrome Custom Tab API to create a customized browsing experience while adding innovative features like background loading with floating bubbles, article mode and multitasking using Android's recent menu.
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[playstore]
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Privacy Browser: Most browsers silently give websites massive amounts of information that allows them to track you and compromise your privacy. In contrast, privacy sensitive features are disabled by default in Privacy Browser. If one of these technologies is required for a website to function correctly, the user may choose to turn it on for just that visit. Or, they can use domain settings to automatically turn on certain features when entering a specific website and turn them off again when leaving.
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[f-droid]
[playstore]
[website]
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SmartCookieWeb: A lightweight, basic and secure web browser that uses less than 8MB of space. There is an Incognito Mode which can be enabled and stops web trackers completely. As well as this, the user agent (your web fingerprint) is the same as every other Smart Cookie user so websites can’t track you. Smart Cookie is ad-free and always will be. There is also an ad blocker included which is enabled by default.
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[f-droid]
[playstore]
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Calculator++: A powerful android calculator that contains most of the features needed. The power of the application is through the use of the Symja library. The results are displayed by Latex.
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[f-droid]
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ncalc: A powerful android calculator that contains most of the features needed. The power of the application is through the use of the Symja library. The results are displayed by Latex.
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[playstore]
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Etar: A material designed open source calendar, for everyone! It features different views (monthly, weekly, daily and agenda), sync with Google Calendar, Exchange and others, dark and light theme, no ads, and more.
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[f-droid]
[playstore]
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Simple Calendar: A simple calendar with events and a customizable widget, optional CalDAV synchronization. You can easily create recurring events and setup reminders, it can also display week numbers. Contains a monthly view and an event list widget where you can customize the color of the text, as well as the alpha and the color of the background.
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[f-droid]
[playstore]
[website]
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Todo Agenda: Home screen widgets for your Android device. Each widget has its own settings and displays configured list of calendar events and tasks so that you can easily have a glimpse at your due, current and upcoming appointments.
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[f-droid]
[playstore]
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FairEmail: Fully featured, open source, privacy oriented email app for Android. FairEmail is easy to setup and works with virtually all email providers, including Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo!
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[f-droid]
[playstore]
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K-9: An open source email client focused on making it easy to chew through large volumes of email.
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[playstore]
[website]
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Lemuroid: An Android open-source emulation project based on Libretro. It's main goals are ease of use, good Android integration and great user experience.
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[playstore]
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RetroArch: Cross-platform, sophisticated frontend for the libretro API. Licensed GPLv3. It attempts to be small and lean while still having all the useful core features expected from an emulator. It is designed to be very portable and features a gamepad-centric and touchscreen UI. It also has a full-featured command-line interface.
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[playstore]
[website]
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AntennaPod: An easy-to-use, flexible and open-source podcast manager for Android.
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[f-droid]
[playstore]
[website]
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Feeder: This is a no-nonsense RSS/Atom/JSON feed reader app for Android, with offline reading, notification support, OPML import/export and material design.
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[f-droid]
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NewPipe: A libre lightweight streaming frontend for Android. NewPipe does not use any Google framework libraries, nor the YouTube API. Websites are only parsed to fetch required info, so this app can be used on devices without Google services installed. Also, you don't need a YouTube account to use NewPipe, which is copylefted libre software.
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[f-droid]
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Tachiyomi: Free and open source manga reader for Android, supports online reading from sources such as MangaDex, MangaSee, Mangakakalot, and more. Local reading of downloaded manga. A configurable reader with multiple viewers, reading directions and other settings, and much more.
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[f-droid]
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Twire: An Open Source, AD-Free Twitch browser and stream player for Android. Supports VODs with chat replay, custom emotes (BTTV and FFZ) and Picture in Picture mode. A fork of Pocket Plays for Twitch.
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[f-droid]
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Amaze: An Open Source, light and smooth file manager that follows material design guidelines. It allows to work on multiple tabs at the same time, quickly access history, bookmarks and to search for any file.
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[f-droid]
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lrkFM: Free and open source file manager for Android with focus on archive extraction (.tar, .tar.gz, .zip, .7z and .rar (but not RARv5)) and creation (.zip).
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[f-droid]
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Material Files: An open source Material Design file manager, for Android 5.0+.
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[f-droid]
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Lichess: The official chess application for lichess.org, this application is open source and free software. It is entirely free and without ads, now and forever.
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[playstore]
[website]
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Pixel Dungeon: A traditional roguelike game with pixel-art graphics and simple interface. Explore the depths of Pixel Dungeon, collect useful items, fight fierce monsters to find Amulet of Yendor (surprise!) - the ultimate artifact of this game world.
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Shattered Pixel Dungeon: Based on the original Pixel Dungeon source code, Shattered is much more balanced and features additional content in the game. It has a bigger learning curve then vanilla since the game is bigger however it is designed in a way where every run is winnable if you know exactly what you are doing.
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[f-droid]
[playstore]
[website]
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TalpaSplat3: Shameless self-plug. A simple and fun FOSS cross-platform game. Tap on the mole as many times as you can before the time runs out, but watch out for the bombs!
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[playstore]
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KISS: A blazingly fast launcher for android requiring nearly no memory to run. KISS becomes smarter and smarter as you use it, pushing forward results you're more likely to select. Search through your apps, contacts and settings lightning fast. No more time spent trying to find the app you want to launch: enter a few characters of the name and hit enter. Need to call someone? Don't meddle with the call log, just give three letters of their name and push the 'phone' button.
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Olauncher: This launcher frees you from distractions so you can focus on the things that actually matter. You should use your phone, not the other way round. It's privacy focused, fast, lightweight, and has no advertisements
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[f-droid]
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Posidon: A one-page launcher with an rss feed. Built from scratch, to be a different experience. The ui was heavily inspired by One UI. Being designed from scratch allows this launcher to be easily optimized for big screens. It's minimal yet feature-rich.
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[f-droid]
[playstore]
[website]
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Rootless Pixel Launcher: A close to AOSP launcher that only changes the necessary code to allow for small extensions and backporting to older Android versions. Pixel Launcher is focused on simplicity and rock solid stability.
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OsmAnd: This project aims at providing comfortable map viewing and navigation (routing) application for mobile devices. Particular stress lies with complete offline features (via pre-loaded offline map data) or economic internet usage.
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Positional: A very flexible and customizable location related information app. It utilises the phone's GPS hardware and fetches various details of the current latitude and longitude data like Altitude, Speed, Address and similar other information and show it in easily understandable format.
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[playstore]
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Street Complete: An easy to use editor of OpenStreetMap data available for Android. It can be used without any OpenStreetMap-specific knowledge. It asks simple questions, with answers directly used to edit and improve OpenStreetMap data. The app is aimed at users who do not know anything about OSM tagging schemes but still want to contribute to OpenStreetMap.
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[f-droid]
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Transportr: The public transport companion that respects your privacy and your freedom. Transportr is a non-profit app developed by people around the world to make using public transport as easy as possible wherever you are. This app uses the data of various local public transport agencies and provides a unified interface for them.
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[f-droid]
[playstore]
[website]
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BookReader: An open-source book reading application. Supported formats: fb2, html, txt, epub, mobi, rtf, doc, pdf, djvu, cbr, cbz.
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[f-droid]
[playstore]
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Librera Reader: An e-book reader for Android devices; it supports the following formats: PDF, EPUB, EPUB3, MOBI, DjVu, FB2, TXT, RTF, AZW, AZW3, HTML, CBZ, CBR, DOC, DOCX, and OPDS Catalogs.
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[f-droid]
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MPV: A video player for Android based on libmpv. It features hardware and software video decoding, gesture-based seeking and volume/brightness control, libass support for styled subtitles, and url streaming.
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[f-droid]
[playstore]
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Music Player GO: A simple yet fully-featured local music player aiming at simplicity and performance.
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[f-droid]
[playstore]
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Photok: a free Photo-Safe. It stores your photos encrypted on your device and hides them from others. It uses technologies like, AES-256 encryption standard or bcrypt, to keep your photos secure. Photok is completely free, open source, and contains no ads.
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[f-droid]
[playstore]
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Retro Music Player: Material design music player with simple interface and lots of features such as driving mode, smart auto playlists, 30+ language support, lyrics screen (download and sync with music), gapless playback, folder support and more.
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[playstore]
[website]
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Simple Gallery: A highly customizable lightweight gallery loved by millions of people for its great user experience. Organize and edit your photos, recover deleted files with the recycle bin, protect & hide files and easily view a huge variety of different photo and video formats including RAW, SVG, GIF, panoramic and much more.
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Vinyl Music Player: A material designed local music player for Android. Forked from Phonograph; makes all Pro features free, as they used to be, and has some additional features.
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[f-droid]
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VLC: A free and open source cross-platform multimedia player and framework that plays most multimedia files as well as DVDs, Audio CDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols.
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[f-droid]
[playstore]
[website]
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Bitwarden: An open source password manager with End-to-End encryption and cross-platform support. Bitwarden makes it easy to generate, store, and secure unique passwords from any location or device.
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[f-droid]
[playstore]
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KeePassDX: A multi-format KeePass manager for Android devices. The app allows creating keys and passwords in a secure way by integrating with the Android design standards.
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[f-droid]
[playstore]
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Loop Habit Tracker: A simple app that helps you create and maintain good habits, allowing you to achieve your long-term goals. Detailed graphs and statistics show you how your habits improved over time.
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[f-droid]
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Markor: A TextEditor for Android. This project aims to make an editor that is versatile, flexible, and lightweight. Markor utilizes simple markup formats like Markdown and todo.txt for note-taking and list management. Markor is versatile at working with text; it can also be used for keeping bookmarks, copying to clipboard, fast opening a link from text and lots of more.
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Orgzly: An outliner for taking notes and managing to-do lists. You can keep notebooks stored in plain-text and have them synchronized with a directory on your mobile device, SD card or Dropbox. Notebooks are saved in Org mode’s file format. “Org mode is for keeping notes, maintaining TODO lists, planning projects, and authoring documents with a fast and effective plain-text system.
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[f-droid]
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p!n: A minimalistic note-taking app utilizing your phone's notification area: take notes and save them as notifications, edit pinned notices, delete pins, hide notes for a specific period of time. This app was built with Material Design in mind. The app was built with Material Design in mind.
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[f-droid]
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Tasks.org: Astrid was a popular cross-platform productivity service. In 2013 Yahoo purchased Astrid, later announcing that the service would be discontinued. The source code from Astrid's open-source Android app serves as the basis for Tasks. Tasks is not affiliated with Astrid or Yahoo.
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[f-droid]
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Termux: An Android terminal emulator and Linux environment app that works directly with no rooting or setup required. A minimal base system is installed automatically - additional packages are available using the APT package manager.
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[f-droid]
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AdAway: An open source ad blocker for Android using the hosts file. The hosts file is a system file that contains a list of mappings between host names and IP addresses. When an app requests an ad from a host in that file, this request is redirected to the local IP 127.0.0.1, which does nothing.
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[f-droid]
[website]
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Aegis: A free, secure and open source 2FA app for Android. It aims to provide a secure authenticator for your online services, while also including some features missing in existing authenticator apps, like proper encryption and backups. Aegis supports HOTP and TOTP, making it compatible with thousands of services.
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[f-droid]
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andOTP: A two-factor authentication App for Android 5.1+. It implements Time-based One-time Passwords (TOTP) and HMAC-Based One-Time Passwords (HOTP). Simply scan the QR code and login with the generated 6-digit code.
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[f-droid]
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Blokada: A free, open source, compact, fast ad blocker for Android that works for all apps and does not require root because it uses the VPN API.
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[f-droid]
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Exodus: Find out what trackers are embedded in apps installed on your smartphone. It lets you also know the permissions required by any apps on your smartphone. It helps you to take your privacy back!
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[f-droid]
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NetGuard: It provides simple and advanced ways to block access to the internet - no root required. Applications and addresses can individually be allowed or denied access to your Wi-Fi and/or mobile connection.
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[f-droid]
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Vigilante: An app that focuses on your privacy and alerts you with a notification when a third-party application uses your device camera or microphone. It doesn't require an internet connection.
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[f-droid]
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Warden: A FOSS app management utility with beautiful material design. This app detects trackers & loggers and allows you to disable them. It also features an advanced profile based app de-bloater.
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[website]
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Yet Another Call Blocker: A free and open source application that can block unwanted calls or warn about probable intentions of callers using a third-party crowdsourced phone number database (from some other proprietary app).
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[f-droid]
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Barinsta: Open-source alternative Instagram client on Android. Barinsta is ad-less, tracker-less and allows you to download posts and stories, and much more.
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[f-droid]
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Frost: A third party Facebook wrapper geared towards design and functionality. It contains many features, including: support for multiple accounts and fast switching, full theming across all activities, and more.
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Infinity: This is a Reddit client on Android written in Java. It does not have any ads and it features clean UI and smooth browsing experience.
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Jami: A free distributed multimedia communication software. Jami allows to make audio or video calls, and to send messages, safely and freely, in confidence. Jami is a Free and open source software that requires no central server.
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Jitsi Meet: Secure, Simple and Scalable Video Conferences that you use as a standalone app or embed in your web application. It lets you stay in touch with all your teams, be they family, friends, or colleagues. Instant video conferences, efficiently adapting to your scale.
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OctoDroid: An open source client for GitHub. Access to GitHub and stay connected to your networks. Follow git repository and top users in GitHub. View all users' activities, source codes and manage your issues with OctoDroid.
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Slide: An open source, ad-free Reddit browser for Android. It is based around the Java Reddit API Wrapper.
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Telegram FOSS: Unofficial, FOSS-friendly fork of the original Telegram client for Android, a messaging app with a focus on speed and security. It’s superfast, simple and free.
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Tusky: A beautiful Android client for Mastodon. Mastodon is an ActivityPub federated social network. That means no single entity controls the whole network, rather, like e-mail, volunteers and organisations operate their own independent servers, users from which can all interact with each other seamlessly.
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Twidere: Material Design ready and feature rich Twitter/Mastodon/StatusNet/Fanfou app for Android 4.1+. Supports powerful mute filters, night mode, multiple accounts, customizable tabs.
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Nextcloud: The Open Source Nextcloud Android app allows you to access all your files on your Nextcloud, a private file sync & share and communication server. It is fully open source and you can host it yourself or pay a company to do it for you. That way, you are in control of your photos, your calendar and contact data, your documents and everything else.
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Syncthing: A continuous file synchronization program. It synchronizes files between two or more computers in real time, safely protected from prying eyes. Your data is your data alone and you deserve to choose where it is stored, whether it is shared with some third party, and how it's transmitted over the internet.
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BeHe Keyboard: Enjoy programming and using special keys (such as CTRL and ALT) on your android device without forgetting the design. You can switch between keyboard faces with a simple press of a button.
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Delta Chat: A messaging app that is completely compatible with the existing e-mail infrastructure. So, with Delta Chat you get the ease of well-known messengers with the reach of e-mail. Moreover, you're independent from other companies or services -- as your data are not related to Delta Chat, you won't even add new dependencies here.
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Hacker's Keyboard: Are you missing the key layout you're used to from your computer when using an Android device? This software keyboard has separate number keys, punctuation in the usual places, and arrow keys. It is based on the AOSP Gingerbread soft keyboard, so it supports multitouch for the modifier keys.
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[f-droid]
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Irregular Expressions: Irregular Expressions is a virtual keyboard for Android devices. With this keyboard you can add expressive flair to your typing, even in places where font styles are not allowed: SMS, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram — any app with typing!
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Mattermost: An open-source, self-hostable online chat service with file sharing, search, and integrations. It is designed as an internal chat for organisations and companies, and mostly markets itself as an open-source alternative to Slack and Microsoft Teams.
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OpenBoard: A 100% FOSS keyboard, based on AOSP, with no dependency on Google binaries, that respects your privacy. It supports spelling correction, themes and emojis.
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QKSMS: An open source replacement to the stock messaging app on Android.
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Signal: A messaging app for simple private communication with friends. Signal uses your phone's data connection (WiFi/3G/4G) to communicate securely, optionally supports plain SMS/MMS to function as a unified messenger, and can also encrypt the stored messages on your phone.
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[playstore]
[website]
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Simple Keyboard: This keyboard is created for those who only need a keyboard and nothing more, it is very simple and lightweight, with minimal permissions required and zero ads.
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BetterBatteryStats: Analyse the behavior of your phone, find applications causing the phone to drain battery while it is supposed to be asleep and measure the effect of corrective actions: spot drainers based on detailed information about the root cause, detect changes in the awake/sleep profile and quickly find the causes (rogue apps).
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[playstore]
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CPU Info: Provides main information about hardware and software of your device: CPU and GPU specification, RAM and storage state, display metrics, sensors data and much more.
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Download Navi: A free and Open Source download manager for Android 4.4+, with material design, and lots of useful features like support for Android TV and Chrome OS, built-in browser, power management and battery control.
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[f-droid]
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KDE Connect: Native Android port of the KDE Connect Qt app. KDE Connect is a multi-platform app that allows your devices to communicate (eg: your phone and your computer).
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[playstore]
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KeyMapper: A free and open source Android app that can map a single or multiple key events to a custom action. The aim of this project is to allow anyone to map their buttons in any combination to anything.
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LTECleaner: LTE Cleaner only aims to clean your phone by removing safe to delete files. Which not only frees up a lot of space, But it also can improve your privacy. Since LTE Cleaners removes .log files, which well, log what you do. LTE Cleaner is 100% free, open source, ad free, and deletes everything it claims too.
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MNML: Pronounced 'minimal', is a free and simple screen recorder for Android. There are too many screen recorders out there now that are badly designed, have too many unnecessary features, or have ads.
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Prism: A beautiful open-source wallpapers app for Android. It is built with Dart on top of Google's Flutter Framework. Prism relies on its Community and WallHaven and Pexels APIs as its source of beautiful and large collection of Wallpapers.
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[playstore]
Any app suggestion is more than welcome and should be submitted via an issue. Please use the given issue template.
Alternatively you can save me some work and send a Pull Request, but make sure to follow the CONTRIBUTING GUIDELINES. This is also the fastest way for your suggestion to be added to the list!
- A BIG LIST of some useful FOSS (free and open-source) apps for Android (Reddit)
- A List of Open Source Applications (Reddit)
- Building a self-updating profile README for GitHub