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!).
There’s lots of FOSS music players, but none of them have a volume slider / preamp. The Android volume slider is always either too loud or quiet so I have to make fine adjustments using the preamp in JetAudio. If someone could add that to an existing music player that’d be cool.
And one that could handle a decent sized library (10s of thousands). One of the few places I’m happy to pay for it, Poweramp will let you buy a licence without google services. If you’ve already bought it and are on GrapheneOS you can enable play services for (3?) days and it stays good after you disable play services. I seldom shill, but here we are…
You can do this in VLC, though it’s not very practical. VLC’s equalizer has a preamp slider, it’s just not great if you want to change it all the time.
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.
What I mean by closer is code-wise. On the backend, WhatsApp literally uses XMPP. The big difference is that WhatsApp also has a few proprietary plugins, and a singular client.
That’s why it’s less janky & doesn’t take minutes to join a room unlike Matrix. WhatsApp to the XTENSIBLE part of XMPP & extended it in a proprietary direction, but at least you have the option to easily do so with XML.
I don’t know what Matrix is giving users other than the eventual consistency model of chat, but most users don’t need the entire chat history of everything—you could argue it is an anti-feature that makes self-hosting too expensive in comparison & also leads to chat overuse/abuse ala Slack/Telegram/Discord where folks treat it as a forum that you can barely search when you have an account while being authenticated & where messages/topics get easily lost. For instance, you can replace an ’announcements room’ with a Atom feed.
I’ve been using it as my only form of messaging with most of my contacts for several years, many of whom have little knowledge of technology. It’s really not.
ah, hopefully with the Digital Markets Act in the EU, reliable bridging to Matrix with E2EE intact will come quickly. You can already bridge (e.g. I run mautrix-whatsapp), but its not in an ideal state
I see, fair enough. I don’t know if you’ll have any luck with a FOSS third party client which does t violate their TOS. There was something on fdroid years ago, a wrapper that effectively allowed you to use WhatsApp Web on another phone (or perhaps even the same one), but it ultimately requried the use of the official clients
Shit, I get banned by their shitty ML algos when I do comply with their ToS. I don’t think most people care about the risk of having to create new accounts, since they’re already forced to do so already.
Ordinarily I’d agree, but for now, WhatsApp is tied to your phone number. I’m not sure if you can use some kind of service to create alias numbers but for many people, that’s a big blocker when it comes to making another account following any kind of infraction.
I don’t think meta would shift in requiring a phone number per account either,
Yeah and not just once. Iirc if their proprietary, closed-source app doesnt call home to their mother ship at least every 2 weeks, then all your WhatsApp Web sessions get deauth’d.
We really need a way to use WhatsApp without using the original spyware app.
Well even if someone creates it, it will still act like a web session. It will just be a frontend. You can’t create a separate app with authentication and everything because it’s proprietary (so you can’t see how authentication works) and messages are E2EE
Edit: someones already mentioned these below… nevermind!
If youre in the EU then EU parliament forced whatsapp to start developing cross-app communications with Signal, telegram etc. (Source). This was in 2022 and was due to be released in March 2024. Im not sure where it got to though since i dont use whatsapp, though i might start asking some friends to see if its rolled out.
Alternatively there are “matrix bridges”. Namely via Matrix which can link messaging apps through matrix accounts and send messages between
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.
The ability to automatically detect commercials (via sound level / machine learning) and skip them would be amazing as well. There’s an app for iOS that does this, but nothing for Android.
What android OS do you use? On stock Android 14 (GrapheneOS, but it’s not a GOS feature) this functionality is built into the stock screenshot tool.
pwr+voldown -> tap screenshot that appears in the overlay after you take it -> tap the crop tool . I suppose step three could be removed but what if you want to do something that isn’t cropping? There are lots of other features so at some point you have to tell the tool what you want to do.
No, I don’t have markup installed (it is there in apps but not installed from the mirror).
I think in my case the screenshot functionality is built into AOSP and the editor you get when tapping the resulting preview overlay in the lower left corner of the screen is part of the “gallery” app since using the “edit” feature from gallery launches the same editor. Maybe GrapheneOS just sets that as the default editor, I’m not sure.
AOSP gallery that comes with GrapheneOS. The app info says it’s called com.android.gallery3d. There’s some info here in the docs about the relationship between camera, edit functions, and the gallery app.
Something that comes up a lot but probably can’t be made open source is a wallet app. But if we ignore the payments part, Google wallet has some really nice features when dealing with plane tickets which I’d love to see in a standalone open source app.
I haven’t checked in a while, but I am still using CX File Explorer because I didn’t find a FOSS alternative I like. Maybe it is just because I am used to it, but one thing I really like is the network feature that you can access local shares of a NAS.
Have you tried Material Files (it’s on fdroid)? It’s genuinely great and it supports different remote protocols, although I haven’t personally tried this feature.
Seems okay, but doesn’t allow editing of local files / folders, it wants you to use their paid sync service. Also its javascript / electron, not native android.
I used Joplin extensively for ~2 years, but I was constantly put off by the desktop applications UI and how my notes was stored in SQLite. The move to obsidian felt natural and I felt more in ownership over my files in their existing structure. Granted, obsidian is closed source and could go rogue, but when that happens, I am prepared to jump ship without too much pain.
I used Joplin for up to 8 hours daily for half a year (university) before switching to Obsidian, too. As far as I know, Joplin lets you store the notes as files, too, but you need to set it up that way from the start.
Still, I found Obsidian to be much more pleasant and - ironically - easier to modify (by writing plugins) than Joplin.
Exactly. Not a huge fan of notes apps storing the data in a db.otherwise there is a lot to like about joplin. With obsidian i open my notes in codium all the time to make mass edits or fill gaps that obsidians UI cant meet, which is not possible with joplin.
Fortunately with obsidian as long as you keep the plugins on the lighter side and keep any non-markdown content in seperate files via linking, im not too worried about having to jump ship if it ever goes bad. Worst case if a plugin dies or i have to migrate, the actual loss of data is that some plugin used json or whatever and it’d have to be converted or replaced.
I do have hope at least that if the company folds they’ll open source it, or turn a blind eye to a community reengineering effort. And what is unique about obsidian markdown and metadata will probably get community-built migration tools quickly if enough people jump ship en masse.
But for the time being Obsidian is the best option for me and i dont feel that bad about it.
I don’t see the hate for storing data in a sqlite database. It’s still your data, you get to do with it as you please, and I’ve yet to see the data encrypted (let’s not give anyone any silly ideas here). You want to see your data outside of the program, just download any sqlite viewer. If you don’t mind CLI, then the tools provided by sqlite are more than good enough and are only a few MB in size.
I think it has more to do with preference than hate. For me particularly, I don’t care much about how things are stored. I just make sure to exporr/backup regularly, and if anything breaks, it’s an easy and mostly painless fix.
I tried Obsidian once, and while I did like it and the UI is light years ahead of Joplin, I guess I’m just used to the Joplin experience, so I saw no need to switch.
Generally speaking I’m not opposed to sqlite. The case of a notes app is the one exception.
If i need to make a big find and replace change, i dont need to rely on the app to have the capability or whip out a sql editor or cli tool. I just open my favorite text editor and do it. Or chain some cli tools built into the os.
Its not even about data portability or export. Its about working with the data.
IMO Obsidian is already a little rogue, in the sense that it only supports their sync. I know you can glue something together by syncing the folder itself, but that’s not convenient or the point. For now I’ll stick with Joplin because it works with nextcloud nicely.
There is at least plugins that enables sync by alternative ways. They’re not as elegant, but work.
Since everything, including settings, is stored in the same root folder as the notes - you can sync your settings along your notes through other tools too.
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