I think it would be interesting to have a thread to gather opinions and discuss on the types of applications that people are missing from F-Droid and the FOSS ecosystem in general.
I am not referring to applications that are already available but for some reason not yet included in F-Droid (you can make requests for those to get included on GitLab). Am concerned with the apps that we are missing in general to fulfill our everyday tasks and needs.
Maybe it would be a good place for developers to get ideas for new apps as well!
For what its worth, I donāt find myself missing any apps any more. When I first started using F-Droid 4 or 5 years ago, there was of course many missing things. Also, I used to play many more games. However now all my apps are from F-Droid, I donāt have Google Play installed any more, and I donāt notice anything missing. Iām sure there are cool things Iām missing out on, but I guess my ignorance is bliss.
Low hanging fruit: a simple app that when launched displays a full-screen HH:MM:SS clock, white on black, maximum screen brightness. You would then photograph this display with your camera when you forget to synchronize the time on your camera and phone before shooting pictures that you plan to later automatically geotag using a recorded GPX file. You can then use the displayed time to calculate a correction offset.
Fancy version: instead of using a stock clock widget, create one that displays the time for 0.5 seconds on the change of seconds, then black screen for the remaining 0.5 seconds. This would make it easier to avoid capturing two different seconds displayed while taking the picture. Might be ridiculously difficult to implement using high-level tools.
A launcher application that focus on customization. Something like SlimLauncher but available for all roms. I know applications like KISS launcher but they are not really address that problem.
Hmm, there are already a number of launchers in Fdroid, Iāve been experimenting with LaunchTime lately and I like the different approach it takes. What kind of customization are you interested in? [quote=āpserwylo, post:2, topic:183ā]
For what its worth, I donāt find myself missing any apps any more.
[/quote]
I feel the same, am able to fulfill all my needs exclusively from Fdroid. But I thought to ask since we all have different use cases. Iāve been following the project since it has only a handful of apps and am nowadays amazed by the variety of apps we have in our hands; a big kudos to all the devs for that!
Yet I still feel excited to check the āWhatās Newā section whenever I see an update, hoping to discover something new.
Something like Trebuchet but with more options I appreciate the different approach other launchers are taking but I only want a simple launcher that lets you change icon packs, gestures and letās you customize everything from renaming the apps to the scale of icons.
an alternative for the Yamaha āAV Controllerā app, which acts as a remote for most of the Yamaha AV receivers and works by sending XML over HTTP POSTs. Was able to simulate that on Linux by using curl -X. Maybe I will look further into that but have not any Android app programming experience by now.
an app like āPingToolsā which offers the possibility to ping network devices, show all devices in the network, TraceRoute, wifi scanner and so on.
an app like āCamScannerā which allows to make a picture of a printed text, rectifies it, and converts it into a black/white picture. Then it should be possible to generate a PDF out of that and share that.
a port of wget which simply allows to download files over HTTP(S) from a known hyperlink.
Free apps with these functions would be very nice.
Iām a happy user of F-Droid (without Google Apps) for quite a while - thanks for making that possible!
Games for young kids. So that a phone is useful to a child without tying the phone/kid/bystanders (ok google?) to the google eco system. If you ask for a specific one Iād probably name SuperTux (GPL).
Stock market apps (Iām aware of Ministocks and StockTicker but their functionality falls short of programs which were available for the PalmPilot a long time ago)
F-Droid Meta App functionality which, based on user profile (base/kid/audio/educational/nontrustedenvironment/sports), suggests a selection of apps. This implies some (preferably automatic - it will be controversial anyway) kind of rating otherwise the user is left to do trial and error. With e.g. as of now 269 members in the category games or 355 in category internet.
I use an instance of OwnCloud together with DAVdroid for calendar and contact sync, you can always self host it. Not sure if this is what you are aiming for though. In my case I use Syncthing for backups of photos and other files.
Itās not trivial to self host owncloud/nextcloud or similar software AND keep the server secure [1]. Syncthing is much easier to set up and update and doesnāt require uploading my data to a server with a public ip. I can even sync my data without internet acces, just with a hotspot on my notebook. Thatās why it would be nice to have something similar for calendar and contacts.
If you havenāt already, check out OpenLauncher that recently landed in F-Droid. Still in alpha but it seems actively developed and you could always make some feature requests.
I miss a tool to analyze the traffic (NetGuard is awesome but I already use a VPN).
A similar app to Tasker / Macrodroid to automate tasks.
A password manager: I use bitwarden which is open source that has non-free dependencies.
A Mastodon client.
I use KeePassDroid as my password manager, itās compatible to keepassx for linux, at least it can read the keepassx container files(I didnāt try to save a file on android yet). Maybe itās compatible to keepass Versions for other operating systems as well, I donāt know.
Check out Dynamic Night Light. It is able to use maximum brightness (see settings) and to disable the screen timeout.
A plain white on black time in big digits moves slowly across the screen. I like it for showing the time during presentations.
Seconded, my needs are fulfilled by most fdroid apps (except for Skype ;-)), but some games for my kids would be terrific. E.g. The Tuxdraw app has a lot more animal stamps in the Linux version and only a few pictures bundled in the fdroid version. Also some updates on the ācolor out drawingā apps that are on fdroid would be nice, but that is clearly outside fdroids boundsā¦
There must be a few more games out there (that are not egoshooters) that are appealing to 6-10 year olds, I guess?!
On Games: Indeed, we are lacking some stuff there. On reason is there
still are less floss gamesā¦ another is that those existing are most
of the time quite hard to build. However, I hope to spend some cycles
on the Android port of SuperTuxKart. Also, I have a working build for
Pepper&Carrot running game, just waiting for an OK from upstream:
Thanks, I looked at that, and all of the other large display clocks available through F-Droid, but they all seem to lack an HH:MM:SS display mode option, and the seconds are essential for this use case. With an option for this, Dynamic Night Light would work well.
