My banking app ಠ_ಠ
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Google Pay/Wallet
Right now tap and pay is completely and hopelessly corporate
The issue is that the digital tap-to-pay cards are actually reissued cards with their own unique numbers. They also require significant security measures to protect from cloning attacks.
So banks need a party that they can safely issue a digital card to, knowing that the card data will be stored safely.
Even a FOSS app that covers all the user's needs is going to have a lot of trouble actually getting a card loaded into it under current standards.
I hate to say it, but crypto wallets are likely the closest thing we're ever going to get to a FOSS tap-to-pay system. Banks are inherently corporate and capitalist, so it's not really in their nature to make things open source.
Perhaps if there were an industry standard for issuing digital cards, instead of banks partnering with centralized wallet apps, we could procure our own digital cards to load onto our phones and watches, or integrate into other devices. But that's a whole other battle that nobody is fighting right now.
A keyboard with swipe typing, multilingual autocorrect and speech to text support that actually works.
Other than that, my only proprietary apps are from commercial services I use and pay for (banking, Spotify, Carsharing and public transport). I'd love for them to become open source, but it's probably not ever gonna happen, cause they rely on verifying my identity.
I've had a good experience with HeliBoard
Japanese has been an open issue for months now, so it's a nope from me.
I went with FUTO Keyboard. It's the only keyboard that ticks all my boxes to replace GBoard so far.
I wish the swiping predictions were a bit better though.
Dating apps.
We need an open source completely free dating app.
No paying for matches, no limits ...just they're in your town, you look at their photos, you can talk, anyone can block anyone.
I don't really care for online dating, but I remember coming across this. They claimed to be open source.
I'm honestly pleasantly surprised to see that this project seems to be rather actively developed.
Which is completely separate from having a meaningful user base (near you), so 🤷
Which is completely separate from having a meaningful user base (near you), so 🤷
Yep, this unfortunately seems to be a much hard problem
I'm with you, but see a million obstacles (aka. reasons for why things require payments).
You would need some form of moderation, to weed out illegal content as well as simply bots, spam, and dead profiles. Also for message content. I've given it some thought and suspect it can be crowd sourced to some degree, but also needs counter balances. Instead of limiting a profile to be live/banned, you could have a percentage score of peer-reported subjective legitimacy (ditto for message responses, heck you could even have a section of outright reviews of the person's behaviour - although that, again would be subject to abuse and moderation).
Hosting, traffic, etc. would be an unavoidable cost, but can be mitigated with low resolution photos (VGA should be "good enough" for an initial impression, no?)
For sure, an open source solution would offer way more fine grained filtering.
Bitwarden. Most people think that their application is open source, but more and more of their code has shifted from the GPL/AGPL licensed code to code in their SDK, which is under a proprietary license. This led to their new Android app being disqualified from being hosted in F-Droid repos.
Keyguard was supposed to be an open source Bitwarden client, but the dev chose to use a custom proprietary license, so that is source available as well.
I've been a paying bitwarden customer for years but i through they were moving more towards free software and not away from it... Makes me consider quitting my subscription. Why do they do this?
Oh!! I didn't know that … :/
Makes me wish Proton had their own password manager.
Honestly, Google Keep notes. Trilium server runs as a UWA on Android but it's pretty ass. And things like Obsidian are way too much for something me and my (non-technical) SO use to share notes
Quillpad. It looks and feels like Keep, but sync to nextcloud
Picsart. I'd like something that can do a bit of photo editing, adjust brightness/contrast/curves, work with layers, and conveniently slap together collages, but that doesn't interrupt me in between every other operation with an ad or a request to sign up for a subscription to the app.
Pedantic, but Google Messages' RCS. And it's all Google's fault because they are holding the API hostage, probably because they want to create familiarity with the app so that people don't switch once they finally open up.
For anyone wondering:
RCS
Rich Communication Services. It is a protocol designed to enhance traditional SMS. RCS allows users to send messages that can include high-resolution images, videos, audio messages, and group chats, as well as features like read receipts, typing indicators, and location sharing.
Not pedantic at all. Google lied about RCS being an open standard.
The pedantic point would be saying that RCS, the protocol, is technically open, but the specific implementation that Google is pushing and being adopted is proprietary 🤓
So yeah. Totally fair point and fuck Google for their RCS bait-and-switch.
Not just that, but they are actively hostile and hypocritical about it. Every 1-3 months they prevent RCS from working on rooted phones or phones running alternate ROMs. The fact that they spent so much time complaining that Apple wouldn't comply with the "open" standard while limiting users' options on their own platform is very frustrating.
Termius
Not just Android, I want a cross-platform ssh client that shares keys. Termius is probably overkill for that, but I haven't found anything else that works on Linux and Android. The real issue that made me stop paying for it is that for rpm based Linux I have to use the snap version and snap is buggy as heck with multitasking.
Tasker, because there's no alternative.
MiXplorer (file manager), because even if not counting the features that should be a different app, it's much better than material files.
All these mouse cursor touchpad for big phones-apps. They seem pretty easy to do and are quite handy.
I really need a libreoffice calc on my android phone. Not just opening (where currently only Microsoft Excel on Android works for me) but also editing and saving to my connected nextcloud (where I have also problems with Excel)
The default Samsung messages app. It allows custom backgrounds for each text conversation. All apps I find only allow custom colors, no custom wallpaper. Eben Google messenger had this feature... Then they took it out and replaced it with pre selected 'color themes'
Whatsapp. I know signal, simplex, matrix, (a billion other things), etc exist that are much better, but where I live, no one uses them, for context, basically everyone, like if you have a phone, you use whatsapp, some government things even happen through whatsapp bots, when people say the word message here, they mean whatsapp. There are about 20-30% (among younger folks) who use telegram, but that is mostly for easier piracy, and larger file sharing (before whatsapp allowed 2 GiB, now they do it habitually). My mom has about a 1000 contacts, and less than 10 of them actually use signal (there are many more who signed up(there was another thing, basically when elon said "just use signal"))
At this point it is not worth getting everyone to switch, the best i have done, is just reducing the number people i communicate with (on whatsapp), and try to just meet in person
Maybe Niagara Launcher, though I'm quite happy to pay the dev a bit of money (not required for most stuff actually, I only login on my phone)
Until recently I'd have said Symfonium for music playback from Jellyfin, but the Finamp beta gave me an OSS alternative.
Ideally banking apps, booking.com and TripAdvisor all had FOSS alternatives, but that's not realistic.
People have hit on most of them here, but here is another big one:
Fitness apps. Mainly calorie tracking, workout tracking and heart rate tracking
Health app
Sleep as Android
(No, gadget bridge is not a replacement for 99% of cases and doesn't even support the gold standard for heart rate tracking, polar H10)
For calorie tracking, the massive food databases required, barcode scanning, and crowd sourcing are generally not compatible with the open source community's privacy ideals. OpenNutriTracker has promise though!
For workout tracking, none of them have any device support and most of them are dead and abandoned. Not to mention heart rate zones, stats and training trends, etc... FitoTrack and Opentracks are good starts though.
And then a google fit alternative. Something that can integrate sleeping, workouts, heart rates, sensors, etc.. Data all in one aggregates place. It is a huge task and it makes sense that there is no open source alternative for it. Especially when the components aren't individually there to aggregate.