xenmaster's minimalist android apps
This is a list of all the apps I use on Android. Most of the apps here are open source and many are replacements for stock Android offerings. Almost all are available on F-Droid.
I don't use any social networking apps so you won't find them here - sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are available via browsers! Same thing with shopping sites, Amazon can be accessed via web-browser.
offline fdroid apps
These are the most commonly used apps on my phone. The vast majority are part of the Simple series of apps, which replace most of the stock android apps which have way too many permissions enabled. You have to pay for these apps if you get them from google play but are free if you get them from f-droid. However, I highly recommend you donate money to the developer if you find them useful.
A simple textfield for adding quick notes.
Need to take a quick note of something to buy, an address, or a startup idea? Then this is the app you've been looking for! No complicated setup steps needed, just type in what you came for. Comes with autosave, so you will not discard your changes by mistake. Supports creating multiple independent notes.
You can access the note in no time by using the customizable and resizable widget, which opens the app on click.
Contains no ads or unnecessary permissions. It is fully opensource, provides customizable colors.
This app is just one piece of a bigger series of apps. You can find the rest of them at https://www.simplemobiletools.com
Simple Gallery is a highly customizable offline gallery. Organize & edit your photos, recover deleted files with the recycle bin, protect & hide files and view a huge variety of different photo & video formats including RAW, SVG and much more.
The app contains no ads and unnecessary permissions. As the app doesn’t require internet access either, your privacy is protected.
SIMPLE GALLERY – FEATURES
• Offline gallery with no ads or popups • Simple gallery photo editor – crop, rotate, resize, draw, filters & more • No internet access needed, giving you more privacy and security • No unnecessary permissions required • Quickly search images, videos & files • Open & view many different photo and video types (RAW, SVG, panoramic etc) • A variety of intuitive gestures to easily edit & organize files • Lots of ways to filter, group & sort files • Customize the appearance of Simple Gallery • Available in 32 languages • Mark files as favorites for quick access • Protect your photos & videos with a pattern, pin or fingerprint • Use pin, pattern & fingerprint to protect the app launch or specific functions too • Recover deleted photos & videos from the recycle bin • Toggle visibility of files to hide photos & videos • Create a customizable slideshow of your files • View detailed information of your files (resolution, EXIF values etc) • Simple Gallery is open source … and much much more!
PHOTO GALLERY EDITOR Simple Gallery makes it easy to edit your pictures on the fly. Crop, flip, rotate and resize your pictures. If you’re feeling a little more creative you can add filters and draw on your pictures!
SUPPORT FOR MANY FILE TYPES Unlike some other gallery viewers & photo organizers, Simple Gallery supports a huge range of different file types including JPEG, PNG, MP4, MKV, RAW, SVG, Panoramic photos, Panoramic videos and many more.
A simple file manager for browsing and editing files and directories.
Can also be used for browsing root files and SDcard content. You can easily copy, move, delete and share anything you wish.
Contains no ads or unnecessary permissions. It is fully opensource, provides a Dark theme too.
This app is just one piece of a bigger series of apps. You can find the rest of them at https://www.simplemobiletools.com
A simple calendar with 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.
Contains no ads or unnecessary permissions. It is fully opensource, provides customizable colors.
The Storage permission is needed only for exporting or importing events from .ics files.
The Contacts permission is used only at importing contact birthdays and anniversaries.
This app is just one piece of a bigger series of apps. You can find the rest of them at https://www.simplemobiletools.com
A simple light app for creating and managing your contacts from any source. The contacts can be stored on your device only, but also synchronized via Google, or other accounts.
You can display your favorite people or groups on a separate list. Groups can be used for sending out batch emails or SMS, to save you some time, you can rename them easily.
You can use it for managing user emails and events too. It has the ability to sort/filter by multiple parameters, optionally display surname as the first name.
It contains handy buttons for calling, or texting your relatives. All visible fields can be customized as you wish, you can easily hide the unused ones. The search function will search the given string at every visible persons field, to make you find your desired one easily.
It supports exporting/importing contacts in vCard format to .vcf files, for easy migrations or backing up your data.
You can protect your contacts by not sharing them with other apps, so you can keep them private.
Like the contact source, you can also easily change their name, email, phone number, address, organization, groups and many other customizable fields. You can use it for storing contact events too, like birthdays, anniversaries, or any other custom ones.
This simple contact editor has many handy settings like showing phone numbers on the main screen, toggle contact thumbnail visibility, showing only contacts with phone numbers, showing a call confirmation dialog before initiating a call. It comes with a quick dialer that also makes use of letters.
You can customize what happens at clicking on a contact. You can either initiate a call, go to the View Details screen, or edit the selected one.
To avoid showing potentially unwanted contacts, it has a powerful built in duplicate entry merger.
It comes with material design and dark theme by default. The lack of internet access gives you more privacy, security and stability than other apps.
Contains no ads or unnecessary permissions. It is fully open camera source, provides customizable colors.
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/SimpleMobileTools
Telegram: https://t.me/SimpleMobileTools
A calculator with the basic functions and a customizable widget.
You can copy the result or formula to clipboard by long pressing it.
The text color of the widget can be customized, as well as the color and the alpha of the background. Press the result or formula in the widget to open the app.
Contains no ads or unnecessary permissions. It is fully opensource, provides a Dark theme too.
This app is just one piece of a bigger series of apps. You can find the rest of them at http://www.simplemobiletools.com
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.
This project started out as a fork of the great OTP Authenticator app written by Bruno Bierbaumer, which has sadly been inactive since 2015. By now almost every aspect of the app has been changed/re-written so the fork status of the Github repository got detached upon user request. But all credit for the original version and for starting this project still goes to Bruno!
Features:
- Free and Open-Source
- Requires minimal permissions
- Camera access for QR code scanning
- Storage access for import and export of the database
- Encrypted storage with two backends: Android KeyStore Password / PIN
- Multiple backup options: Plain-text Password-protected OpenPGP-encrypted
- Sleek minimalistic Material Design with three different themes: Light Dark Black (for OLED screens)
- Great Usability
- Compatible with Google Authenticator
- Supported algorithms: TOTP (Time-based One-time Passwords) as specified in RFC 6238 HOTP (HMAC-based One-time Passwords) as specified in RFC 4226
KeePassDroid is an implementation of the KeePass password safe for the Android platform.
Ultra-small, ultra-fast, exceptional PDF rendering solution.
MuPDF is a highly versatile, customizable PDF, XPS, and eBook interpreter solution that can be used across a wide range of applications as a PDF renderer, viewer, or toolkit. A few of our interactive features include digital signatures, PDF redactions, form filling, annotations, and page manipulation.
The MuPDF SDK is designed for easy implementation and immediate productivity for developers, making it a perfect fit for mobile browsers, eBooks, and embedded applications where speed and quality are key. MuPDF supports the widest range of document input and output formats in today's market.
There are several versions of MuPDF consisting of a software library, command-line tools, and viewers for various platforms. The viewers can be downloaded from Google Play and the App Store. The SDK can be licensed from Artifex for commercial use or under the AGPL for open source use.
MuPDF runs on a wide range of operating systems including Android, iOS, Windows, macOS, Linux, and Unix-like systems. We added language bindings for Java, C++, and Python, as well as Web Viewers powered by WebAssembly.
online fdroid apps
Some important notes about this section:
- Netguard is the most important entry on here - you can use it to block your other apps (including stock android apps) from connecting to the internet via wifi or cellular network without even requiring root!
- NewPipe is a great app, but updates cause it to break more often than I would like.
- Yalp and Aurora store are both great ways to get gplay apps without getting into Google Play and having to sign up your phone with Google. However, these apps usually return errors when connecting to download APKs. The Yalp version on Github does not have this issue. Not the easiest way to install and update apps (both are on F-Droid too), but you are guaranteed to have a better experience.
NetGuard 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.
Blocking access to the internet can help:
reduce your data usage save your battery increase your privacy
Seamlessly take control of your personal information, no matter where the Internet takes you. At DuckDuckGo, we believe the Internet shouldn't feel so creepy, and getting the privacy you deserve online should be as simple as closing the blinds.
Our app provides the privacy essentials you need to seamlessly take control of your personal information as you search and browse the web, no matter where the Internet takes you:
• Escape Advertising Tracker Networks — Our Privacy Protection will block all the hidden third-party trackers we can find, exposing the major advertising networks tracking you over time, so that you can track who's trying to track you.
• Increase Encryption Protection — We force sites to use an encrypted connection where available, protecting your data from prying eyes, like ISPs.
• Search Privately — You share your most personal information with your search engine, like your financial, medical, and political questions. What you search for is your own business, which is why DuckDuckGo search doesn't track you. Ever.
• Decode Privacy Policies — We’ve partnered with Terms of Service Didn't Read to include their scores and labels of website terms of service and privacy policies, where available.
As you search and browse, the DuckDuckGo Privacy Browser shows you a Privacy Grade rating when you visit a website (A-F). This rating lets you see how protected you are at a glance, dig into the details to see who we caught trying to track you, and learn how we enhanced the underlying site's privacy measures. The Privacy Grade is scored automatically based on the prevalence of hidden tracker networks, encryption availability, and website privacy practices.
Our app provides standard browsing functionality including tabs, bookmarks, and autocomplete. In addition to strong Privacy Protection as described above, we also packed in some extra privacy features into the browser itself:
spaRSS DecSync is a fork of spaRSS which adds synchronization using DecSync. To start synchronizing, all you have to do is synchronize the directory DecSync located in the primary external storage, using for example Syncthing.
NewPipe is a lightweight YouTube front-end for Android. Also YouTube Music . Beta support for SoundCloud , Bandcamp , and PeerTube etc. It's FLOSS (Open source).
No YouTube account required. It doesn't need the YouTube API or any Google Play Services, as NewPipe only parses the YouTube in order to gain the information. Therefore this app can be used on devices without Google Services installed. NewPipe Extractor is used by other apps for this purpose.
NewPipe Legacy (Android 4.1+) version available on website.
Features
- Search videos
- Display general information about a video
- Watch videos at resolutions up to 4K
- Listen to audio in the background, only loading the audio stream to save data
- Popup mode (floating player, aka Picture-in-Picture)
- Watch live streams
- Show/hide subtitles/closed captions
- Search videos and audios (on YouTube, you can specify the content language as well)
- Enqueue videos (and optionally save them as local playlists)
- Show/hide general information about videos (such as description and tags)
- Show/hide next/related videos
- Show/hide comments
- Search videos, audios, channels, playlists and albums
- Browse videos and audios within a channel
- Subscribe to channels (yes, without logging into any account!)
- Get notifications about new videos from channels you're subscribed to
- Create and edit channel groups (for easier browsing and management)
- Browse video feeds generated from your channel groups
- View and search your watch history
- Search and watch playlists (these are remote playlists, which means they're fetched from the service you're browsing)
- Create and edit local playlists (these are created and saved within the app, and have nothing to do with any service)
- Download videos/audios/subtitles (closed captions)
- Open in Kodi
- Watch/Block age-restricted material
Supported Services
- YouTube & YouTube Music - one of the most popular video and live streaming platforms, including music, news, gaming and much more. Best supported out of the five.
- PeerTube - a decentralized video platform. Any PeerTube instance can be added to NewPipe.
- SoundCloud - a streaming platform for music.
- Bandcamp - an artist-friendly platform for sharing music. It offers user-friendly DRM-free downloads.
- media.ccc.de - the video archive and live streaming platform of the German hacker and information security activist group Chaos Computer Club.
The F-Droid Repository is an easily-installable catalogue of free and open source apps for Android. With F-Droid, it's easy to browse and install apps on your device, and keep track of updates. You can also browse the repository with a web browser, and download the app directly from there, if you can’t or don’t want to run the F-Droid client on your device.
All applications in the default repository must be Free and Open Source software – for example, released under a GPL or Apache license. Every effort is made to verify that this is actually the case, both by visual inspection of the source, and by building the application from the published source.
Software that reports user activity without permission (e.g. via Google Analytics) or tracks user behaviour (e.g. most advertising platforms) is specifically excluded from FDroid’s own repository, as is software with the primary purpose of interacting with a non-Free network service. You are, of course, free to set up your own repository for this kind of software – the server source is available, and the client will allow addition or removal of repositories as you see fit.
F-Droid originated as a fork of Aptoide. F-Droid can be installed from its website or from within Aptoide, but it is not available for download in Google Market.
Yalp Store lets you download apps from Google Play Store as apk files. It can search for updates of installed apps and lets you search for other apps. Yalp saves downloaded apks to your default download folder. Other features include browsing categories, viewing and leaving reviews, black/white-listing apps for updates, filtering apps by being free/paid and containing/not containing ads.
To supplement the features related to Google Play, Yalp Store has ordinary package manager features: listing, running, installing and uninstalling local apps.
If root is available, Yalp Store can update your apps in background, install and uninstall system apps.
By default Yalp Store connects to Google services using a built-in account, so you do not have to own a Google account to use it. The only reason to use a live Google account is to access the paid apps you own.
Aurora Store is an unofficial, FOSS client to Google's Play Store with an elegant design. Not only does Aurora Store download, update, and search for apps like the Play Store, it also empowers the user with new features.
For those concerned with privacy, Aurora Store does not require Google's proprietary framework (spyware?) to operate; It works perfectly fine with or without GooglePlayService or MicroG. However, those still reliant on those services are welcome to use Aurora Store as well!
While Aurora Store was originally based on Sergei Yeriomin's Yalp store, v3.0 is a clean & complete rewrite from scratch that follows Material Design and runs on all devices running Android 5.0+.
Features
Free/Libre software -- Has GPLv3 licence
Beautiful design -- Built upon latest Material Design guidelines
Anonymous accounts -- You can log in and download with anonymous accounts so you don't have to use your own account
Personal Accounts -- You can download purchased apps or access your wishlist by using your own Google account
Exodus integration -- Instantly see trackers an app is hiding in its code
Orfox is built from the same source code as Tor Browser (which is built upon Mozilla Firefox ), but with a few minor modifications to the privacy enhancing features to make them compatible with Firefox for Android and the Android operating system.
The Tor software protects you by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world: it prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location, and it lets you access sites which are blocked.
Orbot is a freely licensed open-source application developed for the Android platform. It acts as a front-end to the Tor binary application, and also provides an HTTP Proxy for connecting web browsers and other HTTP client applications into the Tor SOCKS interface.
Orbot is a component of the Guardian Project, an effort to develop a secure, anonymous smartphone for use by human rights activists, journalists and others around the world. Learn more: https://guardianproject.info/
Tor protects your privacy on the internet by hiding the connection between your Internet address and the services you use. We believe Tor is reasonably secure, but please ensure you read the instructions and configure it properly. Learn more at https://torproject.org/
Tor Frequently Asked Questions: https://support.torproject.org/faq/
Users' privacy and security is a huge concern these days and WiFi Analyzer (open-source) is designed to use as few permissions as possible. It asks for just enough to perform the analysis. Plus, it is all open source so nothing is hidden! Most notably, this application does not require access to internet, so you can be sure it does not send any personal/device information to any other source and it does not receive any information from other sources.
WiFi Analyzer is under active development by volunteers. WiFi Analyzer is free, has no-ads and does not collect any personal information. WiFi Analyzer is not a WiFi password cracking or phishing tool.
Features:
- Identify nearby Access Points
- Graph channels signal strength
- Graph Access Point signal strength over time
- Analyze WiFi networks to rate channels
- HT/VHT Detection - 40/80/160MHz (Requires Android OS 6+)
- Access Point view complete or compact
- Estimated Distance to the Access Points
- Export access points details
- Dark or Light theme available
- Pause/Resume scanning
- Available filters: WiFi band, Signal strength, Security and SSID
- Vendor/OUI Database Lookup
Usage Tips:
- Tap the title bar to switch between 2.4 and 5 GHz WiFi band.
- Swipe to manually refresh screen content.
- Swipe left/right at the bottom of the screen to navigate to the next/previous screen
- SSID with (***) means it is hidden.
A network file-sharing application that makes sending a file to another machine on the local network as easy as dragging-and-dropping.
NitroShare is designed to be hassle-free in every aspect. Just install the application on any machine running Ubuntu or Windows and you're all set. Each machine should discover all of the other machines on the local network. The application integrates with the operating system, using application indicators on Ubuntu and the system tray on Windows.
google-play apps
Signal is available on their respective websites as APKs, but using Yalp or Aurora to get the APK from google play is a far better option.
Current supported android versions have call-blocking, but only Mr. Number has the biggest bank of spam numbers to filter out so I choose to use this.
**edit: removed wire and mr. number. Had too many technical issues where messages sent through Wire never get delivered. Mr. Number has since required payment to continue using its more useful services and from the numerous reviews, even the paid version does not work very well.
Using Signal, you can communicate instantly with your relatives without making a compromise on privacy or security. Make video calls, send messages, pictures, videos, documents, voice recordings, GIFs, contacts & location, create groups so that you can chat in real time with all your friends at once and react to their messages with emojis -all with complete privacy-. Signal servers never have access to any of your communications and never store any of your data.
- Say Anything - Share text, voice messages, photos, videos, GIFs and files for free. Signal uses your phone's data connection so you can avoid SMS (No longer supports SMS or MMS) and MMS fees.
- Speak Freely - Make crystal-clear voice and video calls to people who live across town, or across the ocean, with no long-distance charges.
- Make Privacy Stick - Add a new layer of expression to your conversations with encrypted stickers. You can also create and share your own sticker packs.
- Get Together with Groups - Group chats make it easy to stay connected to your family, friends, and coworkers.
- No ads. No trackers. No kidding. - There are no ads, no affiliate marketers, and no creepy tracking in Signal. So focus on sharing the moments that matter with the people who matter to you.
- Remain Connected - Push notifications let you know when new messages have arrived, and they'll be waiting for you even if your battery dies or you temporarily lose service.
- View Source - All of our code is free, open, and available on GitHub (https://github.com/signalapp).
- Join Movements - Technology developed by Open Whisper Systems is trusted and used by millions of people around the world every day.
Security Our secure VPN sends your internet traffic through an encrypted VPN tunnel, so your passwords and confidential data stay safe, even over public or untrusted Internet connections.
Privacy Keep your browsing history private. As a Swiss VPN provider, we do not log user activity or share data with third parties. Our anonymous VPN service enables Internet without surveillance.
Freedom We created Proton VPN to protect the journalists and activists who use Proton Mail. Proton VPN breaks down the barriers of Internet censorship, allowing you to access any website or content.
Internet security for everyone Our goal is to make online privacy accessible to all. To do this, we have focused on making the advanced security technology in Proton VPN effortless to use and freely available.
Free VPN We believe privacy and security are fundamental human rights, so we also provide a free version of Proton VPN to the public. Unlike other free VPNs, there are no catches. We don't serve ads or secretly sell your browsing history. Proton VPN Free is subsidized by Proton VPN paid users. If you would like to support online privacy, please consider upgrading to a paid plan for faster speeds and more features.
Easy to Use The best security tools in the world will only protect you if used correctly and consistently. We have extensively simplified the Proton VPN interface to make it as intuitive as possible – so you can stay protected every day, hassle free.
Fast VPN Speeds A 10 Gbps server network combined with our unique suite of VPN Accelerator technologies can improve speeds by over 400%. The advanced network TCP flow control algorithm we utilize provides unparalleled performance and connection stability.
Multi-Platform Support Proton VPN is available on all your devices, including PCs, Macs, smartphones, and even routers. A secure Internet connection that you can trust is essential to maintaining your privacy on your laptop at home, your mobile device on the road, or your workstation at the office. Proton VPN has native apps for Windows, macOS, Linux, Chromebook, Android, Android TV and iOS/iPadOS.
Stream from anywhere Proton VPN unblocks a wide selection of popular online media services, allowing you to access your favorite streaming content from anywhere in the world as if you were at home. Our fast server network and unique VPN Accelerator technology also ensure your experience is smooth and buffering-free.
VPN Accelerator VPN Accelerator is a set of technologies unique to Proton VPN that can increase your VPN speeds by over 400%. By overcoming CPU limitations that affect how VPN protocols are processed, using advanced networking techniques to reduce latency, and redesigning VPN protocols themselves to reduce inefficiencies in their code, VPN Accelerator can dramatically increase speed performance.
Native Apps
In addition to all these apps, I still use the following stock android functionality
- Messenger: This is just incidental - people who message me get me on Messenger.
- Dialer: Stock dialer hasn't caused any problems yet, but may look into replacing it soon.
- Camera: There's FOSS apps for cameras, but none that work as well as the original.
- Flashlight: This is not an app, but a controller to turn on and off the flashlight. Works better than any of the other options out there.
- Nightlight: I used to use Redmoon for this, but now the native functionality to reduce blue-light works well enough.
Comments
Open Camera
just try it ^^