Android Apps

Hey there, I'm currently trying to publish an app to the Play Store, but apparently need 12 people to beta test it first, and it sadly seems only 3 of my friends use Android. Can anyone else share tips on recruiting beta testers? Thanks!

Hey all, I've got a few apps I rely on daily, such as Total Commander, CX File Explorer and Material Files. Regarding my current needs, none suffice 🙁

The closest I guess would be Material Files, but it will only show a grid of two columns or just a list. I'd like to have the kind of flexibility of a typical desktop file browser like Explorer. Or on iOS FileBrowser by Stratospherix. That app is amazing but they don't make it for Android.

I've tried so many. On older devices I can use Asus File Explorer which comes stock on their phones, but I only have a version that's a little older, and it won't do SMB on my Androis 13 device. It works on older ones.

I've also tried out Astro and Amaze, they both have good and bad aspects but neither provides what I want.

Anyway, verbose post I know, but if you have any recommendations I would really appreciate it.

I am looking for an app that would let me listen to internet radio on one station, but would automatically jump to another at a set time.

The use case is pretty straightforward - I love the national news from CBC but hate everything else they do. I want to listen to good music then jump to CBC at the top of the hour for 10 minutes to catch the national news.

:schenklradio: Android ohne Google: Vollständige Anleitung zum Leben ohne GMS, alternative Stores, MicroG und private ROMs

:loading: Die Verwendung von Android ohne Google ist nicht nur möglich, sondern kann auch eine gute Idee sein. Wenn Ihnen der Datenschutz am wichtigsten ist, Sie die Telemetrie reduzieren und mehr Kontrolle über Ihr Telefon haben möchten.

https://de.androidguias.com/Android-ohne-Google%3A-Vollst%C3%A4ndiger-Leitfaden-zum-Leben-ohne-GSM--alternative-MicroG-Stores-und-private-ROMs/

@androidapps

Zero news, zero announcements. Completely sneak release of a sequel of a very old classic mobile game

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=me.pou.app3d

Seems to be USA only.

I'm looking for software (very preferably FOSS) that can achieve the following challenge:

I want to position numerous android devices and then using one separate device, view an array of all those devices' camera views, independently control at least minimally such as PTZ the frame and take pictures and videos - and take synced photos and videos commanding them all concurrently. The more features the better. And while I prefer a FOSS app for basic functionality, I would not be opposed to a moderate onetime price (no subs) for something that's fairly sophisticated.

Hoping I've made my needs clear, but let me know if not.

Thanks.

I've been using Pi Music Player, and I'd like to switch to something free and open source. The only feature I absolutely need is the ability to import m3u8 playlists from the file system into the app's own playlist database, in bulk. That is, it must be able to import /Playlists (or any folder that contains playlists) that point to local music on my phone, overwriting playlists of the same name it previously imported. This is how I keep my phone's playlists in sync with my PC's. Pi Music Player supports this. It also supports creating playlists on the phone and exporting them to a file, but that's less important to me.

UPDATE:

I have installed both the music apps I described below and Retro (fork of Metro) and prefer the UI of Lotus. I am currently typing this with Summit, which feels like an Android version of mLem in terms of UI (in a good way) while being very customisable too! I have also installed a few of the other apps mentioned, like Syncthing-Fork and Offline Translator. FUTO Voice Input is useful too. Thanks everyone!

original post:

First off, I have already installed and am happy with (I don't need any suggestions for these):

• Fennec (browser)
• Heliboard (keyboard, it's awesome!)
• Aves (image gallery)
• AntennaPod (podcasts)
• DAVx^5^ + Etar (calendar)
  • Fossify Calendar looks nice, but is less functional in my opinion (you can't see the full name of events in month view!)
• Joplin (notes)
• CalcYou (calculator)
• Breezy Weather
• CoMaps
• Thunderbird (email)
• Material Files (file manager)
• Chrono (alarms, timers, etc.)
• ConnectYou (contacts)
• Fossify Messages (SMS)
  • also considering Quik SMS, does it have any advantages over Fossify?
• Moshidon (Mastodon)
• RSS feed reader (Feeder + CapyReader, one of the two probably, both are great)
• Image Toolbox
• My self-hosted stuff (Nextcloud and Immich)
• KeePassDX (password manager)
• Ente Auth (2FA)
• KDE Connect

I currently need:

• music player (Metro and Vanilla Music are both unmaintained, so those are out. I've also found Auxio, CuteMusic, Lotus, and Phocid as options. Are there any other good ones? I want local playback, not stuff using YT Music)
• Lemmy client (Jerboa crashes when trying to log in for some reason, I've heard Thunder might be good?)
• are there any other apps I should look at?

Another thing, is there a guide to what all the settings in Heliboard do? It's kind of overwhelming. One thing I have changed is the "bottom padding" to make the space bar a bit up, since I accidentally press "c" and "v" way too often when trying to hit space. Also, being able to enable the number row is pretty cool!

EDIT: I have KDE Connect as well!

Hi everyone. My name is Victor.

I have been a premium user of Spotify for over 5 years. I noticed that I had over 800 tracks in my playlist, but Spotify would consistently play about 10 of them on repeat in a specific order. I could predict the exact song Spotify would play next every single time.

I have been writing code since I was 7 years old (Q-Basic. Yes, I’m old), and I also have a Master’s in Computer Science, so I decided to write a website that would randomize the order of my tracks in the playlist. I would then play the playlist with shuffle off. The idea was that since the order of the tracks had become random, playing the tracks serially would allow me to hear tracks in a random order.

It worked!

But, Spotify has a rate limit (Spotify restricts how fast developers can do stuff on Spotify). So, I had to slow down the process of randomizing the tracks. This caused 2 issues:

The more songs I had in the playlist, the slower the process was.

I would have to randomize the tracks again every so often.

So, I went back to the drawing board to figure out how I could completely automate the entire process and make it faster.

This was the idea:

I would ask Spotify to tell me when it wants to play a new track.

I would then choose a truly random track in the playlist and add it to the queue Spotify plays from.

Rinse Repeat.

It worked! It also solved a number of problems:

its all happening in the background, so there is no need to manually go to some website to randomize your tracks.

It doesn’t make lots of requests to Spotify’s server. It’s talking directly to the Spotify app on your device most of the time.

It leaves the order of your tracks as is. You might have chosen the order you like your tracks to be played in.

One of my early users told me to make it remember the tracks it has already played. Such that, it would play random tracks it has not played before. After playing all the tracks in the playlist exactly once, randomly. It would then reset itself and do it all again. I implemented it quickly and enjoyed an even better Spotify listening experience.

There were some challenges:

Since the app runs in the background to listen to Spotify’s messages, it can only work on Android devices. IOS does not allow apps to run indefinitely in the background.

Even though Android allows apps to run in the background, it doesn’t allow apps to run for more than 24 hours at a time. So, the app will need to be restarted every 24 hours.

Android 14+ devices have some battery optimizations that stop Spotify from sending the messages my app needs to work properly. I found a way around this issue. The solution would be for my app to listen to the Notifications on the device. Spotify puts up a notification when it’s playing tracks. My app could pay attention to that notification to learn when a new track is being played. But, there is no way to place a filter such that my app would only see Spotify’s notification. It would need to see all notifications. I do not want that much responsibility, so I did not implement it.

Over the years, I have added more features to the app such that it can be used to manage your Spotify account as well.

The name of the app is “Virtual Shuffle – Truly Random”. You can find it here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.virock.virtualshufflev2&hl=en

You can ask me any questions about it. You can also request additional features.

Nowhere do they mention that this is meant to be a fork either. For obvious reasons, I won't sign into YouTube on the clone, but even without it, it's pretty apparent that the only thing that appears to be changed was the credits.

Side by side comparisons of the apps (Metrolist on left)

(ps, if this isn't the right sub to post this, I'd appreciate a redirect)

Available from F-Droid as Offline Translator.

Originally called Firefox Translator based on the use of the Firefox translation models, Translator is an on-device translation app that has grown by leaps and bounds over this summer.

It includes live image translation, using tesseract OCR and automatic language detection. I've been impressed by how quick and well designed it is since beginning testing. There are many languages available, including non-western scripts.

I don't think I saw anything suitable on F-droid; I also don't know if these apps are localised (wrt species, not language), if so, I'm in Northern Europe.

TIA

Thanks for all the answers! plantnet.org is bookmarked.

And since this is a work phone it has all the google stuff anyhow and a colleague showed me how to use the Google search bar's camera symbol for identifying stuff ;)

As per title. Not looking for a full fledge editor honestly. But just that it can support layers and can crop and draw on that layer.

Image Toolbox have is but it's all disjointed by function and needs saving lots of copies between each function.

Wouldn't mind a drawing app as well tbh since I have a S24 Ultra and a drawing app is a good "justification" for that stylus :P

I forgot which drawing app on android that's free of subscription

cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/42949921

Does anybody have experience with the apps Neo Backup, DataBackup or ideally both?

I would like to know if there are any differences in terms of functionality, capability or reliability? Like, is there some kind of app data, that one can backup/restore while the other can't? Are there speed differences in the backup/restore process? etc.

I've searched the internet for some comparisons but couldn't find much.

For context: I want to transfer all my apps to a new phone. In the past, I've used Titanium Backup for this, but it doesn't seem to be very up-to-date anymore. Now, Neo Backup and Data Backup seem to be the most promising (besides maybe SwiftBackup, but that's not open source and only available through the Play Store, it seems). So now I could of course just use one app first, backup everything on my old phone, restore everything on the new one and then look through all the apps to see what worked and what didn't. But it would be easier if I could get a hint on which one might be more suitable for my needs :)

Also, if you would recommend to use another app instead, please tell me!

Thank you all!

Links

Neo Backup

F-Droid: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.machiav3lli.backup

GitHub: https://github.com/NeoApplications/Neo-Backup

DataBackup

F-Droid: https://f-droid.org/packages/com.xayah.databackup.foss

GitHub: https://github.com/XayahSuSuSu/Android-DataBackup

I've tried lawnchair and kvaesito. Lawnchair was good feature-wise but it is really glitchy and would break a ton of times. Kvaesito is not a traditional launcher but rather search-based which is not my thing. I've also heard about Niagara but I haven't tried it and it's also closed-source so I don't really want to use it. Are there any up-to-date open source launchers with a decent amount of features other than the ones I've mentioned?

Two days ago, l had downloaded the inviziblepro app from playstore for private and anonymous viewing. l also have proton vpn. Obviously l'm disconnecting my proton vpn while using inviziblepro.

But the only thing that happened when inviziblepro is on is that my internet is stopping altogether. The moment l am stopping inviziblepro, my device is doing its normal functions once again.

It gave me such a tough time that I uninstalled it finally.

Is the app meant to take complete control of your phone ?

I'm not sure about the exact issues that seem to have caused a rift in the project, but I generally think forks are good for FOSS development.

From the project page:

At CoMaps, we are dedicated to ensuring that all project-related efforts are conducted in public, providing full transparency in decision-making, priorities, financials, and operations. We believe in community decision-making, where those impacted by decisions have a voice and are empowered to participate. The project operates as a not-for-profit entity, focusing on creating value for the community rather than generating profit. We are committed to maintaining the complete codebase and associated resources under Free and Open Source Software licenses.

So far I've tried Metrolist, Outertune and Kreate, and none of them can.

I assume this is a limitation somehow, but asking here just in case there is an app that can.

TIA

Edit: I've looked at this open source music streaming list and tried SimpMusic. And hey presto it can do what I wanted to do.

The issue for me with Metrolist and Outertune is that it can only do local playlist that can be synced to my YT Music account. It could mean that say if I save my "MUsiiic" playlist from YTM as a local playlist, then enable sync to YTM, it would create double playlist.

I assume SimpMusic does the same somehow but it looks like I "turn on" save to local and sync it back to YTM. I checked and it didn't make duplicate playlist.

Edit 2025-05-28: One flaw -- not a giant one, but is making me look again -- that I found is that the sleep timer cannot do "end of song". So close to perfection, but this is a feature I use a lot. I'll have to look into their issues and see if someone already asked for it or not.

We haven't had a must-have app thread in quite a while, and since mobile ecosystem moves so fast, thought it might be a good idea to see what people are using these days and consider their must have apps.

Hey Android lovers, I just released Flogo, a flowchart-based visual programming app that lets you build, simulate, and execute real algorithms — all from your phone or tablet.

✔️ Design logic with drag & drop blocks ✔️ Simulate in real time (with variable console and interactive flow navigation) ✔️ Supports math, complex numbers, matrices, loops, conditionals ✔️ Includes plot(), input blocks, and over 100 functions ✔️ Free, no ads, no tracking

Great for students, teachers, hobbyists, or anyone who loves logic and clean design.

Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.flogo.myapp

Let me know what you think — feedback is really appreciated!

A memory game made for kids, free and open source with no tracking!

Pending Google review, so for now only the GitHub link where you can download it from the releases (or better yet, use Obtainium).

Currently features two theme packs: sea creatures and dinosaurs.

It's the first game I ever made, so let me know what you think!

Edit: It's now live on Google Play!

Edit: Added some screenshots