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Comment on What Are Your Favorite Hidden Gem Android Apps with Less Than 1 Million Downloads and 4+ Star Ratings?

netchami@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

LibreTube or NewPipe for watching YouTube videos without ads or tracking.

Seal for downloading YouTube videos.

Retro Music Player - probably the best looking music app for Android.

Pano Scrobbler - a FOSS app for Last.fm, Libre.fm and Listenbrainz. (I recommend Obtanium to download it from GitHub.)

Droid-ify is a much nicer client for F-Droid.

Obtanium for downloading apps from various other sources.

Aurora Store for anonymously downloading apps from the Play Store without a Google account

Molly - a better Signal client. (You can use Obtanium to download it from GitHub, you can add their F-Droid repo or download it using Accressent, a new experimental app store that seeks to replace F-Droid.)

Gallery - a simple gallery app that looks good and respects your Material You theme.

Murglar for downloading Music in full quality from Deezer.

Element X is a much better Matrix client than the standard Element app. (I recommend downloading it from GitHub using Obtanium)

LinkSheet - a small app that restores the old Android URL link chooser. It has many great features like the ability to remove tracking parameters from URLs or using FastForward to annoying bypass URL shorteners.

UntrackMe - a tool that can redirect YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, etc. links to privacy-friendly alternative frontends like Invidious or Piped for YouTube, Nitter for Twitter and LibReddit or Teddit for Reddit

Thunder, the best Lemmy client I ever used.

Most of the apps I mentioned are free and open source and many of them are available on F-Droid. They don’t collect or sell any of your data.

The last one is not an app, but an entire OS that can replace the spyware-infested ROM that’s preinstalled by your phones’ manufacturer. I’m talking about GrapheneOS. No ads, no tracking, no proprietary Google services. Just free and open source software with maximum privacy and security. It’s so great!

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s38b35M5@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Excellent list

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- netchami@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I’m glad you like it
  
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  - s38b35M5@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I didn’t know about most of these, and am playing with several now. Thx!
    
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    netchami@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Have fun!
    
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jvrava9@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Some alternatives and corrections to your list:

You can already download YT videos in LibreTube and NewPipe, speaking about NewPipe, I would suggest using NewPipeSponsosblock for blocking in video sponsors from creators. Aves Libre is a better advanced Gallery alternative with EXIF editing.

Aimp is a good alternative to Retro.

Spotiflyer is an alternative Murglar.

Schildi Chat is a better alternative to Element X, its based on Element but is a lot faster and has a lot more options.

Ps: I’ve been seeing a lot of posts and comments by you in the communities that I follow, just want to tell you thx for contrubuting to them xD.
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- netchami@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Thanks for participating in the discussion. I have to disagree on some of your point though.
  
  You can already download YT videos in LibreTube and NewPipe, speaking about NewPipe, I would suggest using NewPipeSponsosblock for blocking in video sponsors from creators.
  
  I have found the download features in both LibreTube and NewPipe to be pretty unreliable. Seal always works. NewPipe x SponsorBlock is great, I use LibreTube which also has SponsorBlock built in, I just included NewPipe in the list because LibreTube breaks sometimes. But yes, NewPipe x SponsorBlock is better than standard NewPipe. BraveNewPipe is even better.
  
  Aves Libre is a better advanced Gallery alternative with EXIF editing
  
  Aves is a good option, it’s also available on Accrescent. Personally though, I dislike the design of the app and prefer Gallery in combination with Image Toolbox for image editing.
  
  Aimp is a good alternative to Retro.
  
  It’s not open-source and thus not available on F-Droid.
  
  Spotiflyer is an alternative Murglar.
  
  In my experience Spotiflyer has been pretty unreliable. It either pulls low quality shit from YouTube or it tries to download from Spotify and fails. So far, Murglar has worked like a dream. Just like deemix on desktop btw. You can use Deezer Premium ARLs from this guide to log in and download genuine 320kbps MP3s or even FLACs. Never had any issues.
  
  Schildi Chat is a better alternative to Element X, its based on Element but is a lot faster and has a lot more options.
  
  I tried it out, personally, I didn’t really like it. Element has been pretty slow for me, but I never had these issues with Element X.
  
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  - jvrava9@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Thz for the feedback. I agree with pretty much all your points. It just goes down to personnal preference and some feautures.
    
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Curious_Canid@lemmy.ca ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Great list overall. Obtainium looks like it could be life-changing. :-)

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- netchami@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I try to get most of my apps from F-Droid (through Droid-ify) or Accrescent, but if they are not available, I turn to Obtanium to either download an APK from a website or from GitHub. It also has the ability to update your apps from your custom sources.
  
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LinkOpensChest_wav@lemmy.one ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Hi, have you switched to using Accressent? Do you like it more than Droid-ify?

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- netchami@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  It’s in a very early stage of development, it currently only offers 11 apps. I really hope it succeeds though, it has better security than F-Droid so I would love to switch to it once it supports more apps.
  
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  - LinkOpensChest_wav@lemmy.one ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I’ll keep an eye on it, thanks!
    
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