Simple Mobile apps have been very popular among FOSS enthusiasts. I’ve personally been using the Gallery, Contacts and the Phone app since a few years now. It’s a shame that it has come to this, will be on the lookout for their forks.
So this just looks like the Community has to take care of the projects and/or find alternatives
Alternatives
File manager - Material Files
That one doesnt have the security vulnerability and I think it is also better. But they are pretty much equal.
Simple Gallery - Aves
I prefer Simple Gallery though, it is pretty great
Simple dialer - Welefon
Very basic, I personally use ACR phone for call recording, with disabled internet permissions. The Dev asked on Reddit about opensourcing the App and got negative responses, so maybe unlikely.
Simple Keyboard - Florisboard
Currently unmaintained but awesome. I hope it gets revived.
Simple Calculator
My favourite: Mint Calculator
Simple SMS
AOSP SMS/MMS, Quik Sms
AOSP SMS is poorly hard to find. That would be great on F-Droid. It also uses old libraries.
All these look way better and have unit transformations.
Some Gems
Some apps have no good replacement
Simple Gallery
Also in my opinion just the best. The Amaze Videoplayer and tools are great though.
Simple Contacts SE
That is the better version with some enhanced features.
Simple Calendar
I just got way better results than using Etar. The Widget is great too.
What about OpenBoard? It is maintained and a great keyboard
NVM, it is not maintained, but there is a very active fork: https://github.com/Helium314/openboard
Dann that is nice!I It will probably be the replacement for people needing autocomplete!
Testint it currently and I think it is the perfect replacement for iPhone people as the cursor thing is similar.
I love the granular autocorrection as I would set only suggestions without correction if the language was new to me.
I will stick with Florisboard though, I prefer the pitch black dark mode (and dont need anything else) and I love the internal clipboard, history, deletion etc. It is so much better for privacy.
Also the text editing shortcuts are great and needed for the clipboard.
Thank you for the recommendations! Material Files seems to work well, I’ve been struggling to find a file manager that doesn’t reset the date modified metadata when transferring photos to the SMB shares on my NAS. Several folders of hundreds of photos now have completely incorrect dates attached to them because of a file manager I used previously :(
So far from my testing Material Files does not do this!
Edit: it’s extremely slow though lol, that’s weird. 250 small photos took several seconds each.
Weird, it is fast on my Pixel 4a that even struggles haaard with Opencamera
koler is much better then welefon
i tried wele after your comment, i’m keeping koler
Welefon is very basic, but if it works it aint shit
Jeez, why can’t we have nice things ?!
What are the alternatives ? I’ll be searching.
If you guys find something, please, report back.
Edit: For gallery, this looks promising: https://f-droid.org/packages/deckers.thibault.aves.libre/
The one and only up to date dialer app I could find. Updated 50 minutes ago at the time of posting this: https://github.com/oxcened/opendialer
Aves Libre is a great gallery app, and Amaze is a good file manager
Alternatives
File manager - Material Files
That one doesnt have the security vulnerability and I think it is also better. But they are pretty much equal.
Simple Gallery - Aves
I prefer Simple Gallery though, it is pretty great
Simple dialer - Welefon
Very basic, I personally use ACR phone for call recording, with disabled internet permissions. The Dev asked on Reddit about opensourcing the App and got negative responses, so maybe unlikely.
Simple Keyboard - Florisboard
Currently unmaintained but awesome. I hope it gets revived.
Simple Calculator
My favourite: Mint Calculator
Simple SMS
AOSP SMS/MMS, Quik Sms
AOSP SMS is poorly hard to find. That would be great on F-Droid. It also uses old libraries.
All these look way better and have unit transformations.
Some Gems
Some apps have no good replacement
Simple Gallery
Also in my opinion just the best. The Amaze Videoplayer and tools are great though.
Simple Contacts SE
That is the better version with some enhanced features.
Simple Calendar
I just got way better results than using Etar. The Widget is great too.
Forks:
- https://github.com/SimplerMobileTools
- https://github.com/FossifyX (from a big maintainer)
When ZipoApps adds advertisements and telemetry to a future version of the Simple Mobile Tools apps, will my Google-Play-installed apps be automatically updated to the newer version with ads and telemetry? I don’t want ZipoApps to get any of my data.
Yes. If you have automatic updates enabled, it will install the newest version with trackers and ads. You could disable the automatic update for these apps and hope they stay relevant to your os for a little while.
Oh no, those apps have replaced many of the OEM’ supplied ones on all my devices. I was fed up with constantly changing UIs and all the different feature sets on every device. I thought I had finally found something useful to consolidate on for the long term!
At least the current versions are pretty bug free and will stay.
Same here.Also apps are completely offline with nice backups. Think like We have to switch
Let’s hope some volunteers pick up the codebase. But it’s a vast number of apps and some will probably be left behind.
