It would be a huge undertaking, but a Fitness and Health tracker / aggregator that could replace Google Fit and the likes.
I really can’t bear how Google, Apple, Samsung, and all these big companies are the primary holders of our most intimate information. I’ve put some measures in place to limit who gets what, but it would be a huge boon to be the sole maintainer of my own info.
The problem is that the various apps and devices which report data won’t immediately support syncing with a FOSS upstart…
The app I use for grabbing my weight and BMI can only sync with a few other apps. The app I use for calorie and diet tracking can likewise only sync with a few apps. They happen to have Google fit in common, so I use that as an intermediary to transfer weight to the calorie/diet app. All my steps, exercise, and sleep stay in Zepp, separate from them all.
It sure would be nice to have one service/application to rule them all and a secure method of storing one’s own personal information without having to give it to the tech companies. Sure, use one of the many cloud services but encrypt all the data so that they can’t steal it. Yadda yadda.
More than once I’ve wondered if I can make something look like google fit to other apps, obviously would have to be on a degoogled rom, which limits its utility for a wider audience.
the devices would have to be degoogled so that the app can gather the necessary information? I never used google fit, so I don’t know how it works nor how it gathers the user information.
I develop a self-hosted service designed to do exactly this! It’s not quite finished yet, but it’s at the point where enough functionality works that it can be used for testing.
KineStop - After Apple announcef Motion Cues, I went looking on Android because I cannot use my devices in a moving vehicle. KineStop is all I found. I went ahead and bought it because it helps (doesn’t completely get rid of motion sickness). I would gladly switch to an open source alternative if one were available.
I don’t have any idea of how conplicated it would be, but a phone app would be a nice option. The stock dialer that comes with FOSS ROMs is OK functionally, but visually looks like it was from 2010. Plus it’s not available through F-droid or other open source app store. Koler is the only serious dialer alternative I’ve seen, and while it looks nice it has always been super buggy.
I’m thinking of this too. I heard there’s only one good alternative dialer app (don’t remember if it was Koler or not). We have a lot of FOSS SMS apps but no dialer ones for some reason
I tried it back when it was under the simple tools developer. I couldn’t get in to his apps (aside from the calendar) for some reason. They all felt half-baked. It’s nice to see that the fossify forks are getting some love, I’ll check it out again.
I like the fossify forks much better than the simple tools, I used to only use the gallery (and even for that I switched to Aves) now I have many of them as default. Dialer is nice, though the integration could flow better.
I’ve tried it, but I am a little picky about UI personally. It functioned well while I used it, but had a very dated style. Totally a cosmetic issue though.
I’m sorry, I don’t have any specific suggestions for you, but I am wondering: is there no open source app you yourself wish existed because you would need it?
Working on an open source app because some else (and not you) needs it, is not a good way of staying engaged and caring about the solution. Being the user and target of a project yourself is usually a much netter way of caring and proposing something tailored to at least one individual, maybe more.
Of course, if you are looking for a programming exercise, go for it, but then you don’t need ideas, you can reimplement something which already exists, perhaps which you like, but in your own way. But if you want to have an impact in the open source, it starts by needing something which you don’t really find anywhere and taking matter in your own hands to fix it :) this is not meant to disincentivize you, quite the opposite! I hope you stay attentive to your digital ecosystem to see which holes can be plugged :)
I maintain a private list of ideas I just think of as I go about my day, of things I would like to write/create for myself and while I won’t be going through with all of them, I hope to be able to pick up one or several of them whenever I have time. I can through some ideas here, not as a hint that you should do it (I’ll probably do them myself regardless), but just to inspire you, maybe:
I am subscribed to a teachable program which has no app and the program is just static information. I want to pull it all and represent it to me offline, not requiring internet to manage my progress. It is also intended to help me archive what I paid for and not depend on the goodwill of teachables to allow me to continue access the resource.
an RSS feed manager which uses embeddings to automatically organise the content by topic rather than by source.
an anki plugin to highlight content in the browser based on words from anki that I have and have not learned, to improve my language learning and reading ability.
I have a few more, but this should give you some hints, I hope! Good luck!
Been using Breezy for awhile after seeing it recommended here on Lenny. I like it, but I do wish I could easily search for a location without having it added to my list of Saved locations.
I can’t really think of anything now because Android FOSS apps ecosystem is really good. What I want to suggest is contributing to already existing projects sometimes. It’s faster and just another thing you can do to help open-source ecosystems
Gadgetbridge is pretty well on it’s way to this. They roll out support for new devices monthly it seems like. Of course there are always feature X and Y that fitbit or garmin does that it doesn’t, but it’s quite an impressive project. I use it with a pebble 2 HR.
I built an open source app a while back that had some similar functionality to sleep as android called “Go to Sleep”. Haven’t updated it for a long time, always wanted to add more things
Is there a way to get colour there? B&W bums me out… I’m on GrapheneOS so have MoonReader (install google services, install, disable network on it, uninstall google services, and you’re good) but ebooks is one of my major use cases on mobile and everything FOSS sucks in comparison…
I like green on black on my phone, nice screen, good for the eyes. I’d love to sync between that and my kobo, but not happening at the moment. Currenly read new things on the kobo and old faves on the phone, it’s fine, but could be better…
You might like oneshot. It’s not quite as full featured as some mood trackers are, but the design is pretty nice. It hasn’t had updates in a year or so, so daily you might be worth checking out too.
Add comment