Making Android Less Shitty, One App at a Time

This article is mostly a place for me to compile and review Android apps I've installed to my Google Pixel 6 Pro, grouped based on their purpose.

This grouping is divided in three categories: Replacements (apps you should use in place of a default Android app), Supplements (utility apps that cover more niche purposes and thus serve more as additions to the experience as opposed to replacing any app) and Toys (games and other miscellaneous stuff).

All apps in the Replacement and Supplement categories are open source, and all of them are available on F-Droid... unless said otherwise. As for the toys, they'll be whatever.

Replacements

Material Files

Material Files is an app I got for one, and only one reason: to extract .RAR files.
Really, it's that simple.

While people all over claim Files by Google has gone very far since it's early days, the inability to extract a .RAR file, let alone a .7z shows that it still got a looooong way to go.
And while Material Files does lack Files by Google's ability to crop images - does it matter if your file manager can crop images? Isn't that, well, some other kind of app's job?

That, and it looks nice. And it's not by Google.

LibreTube

Because the default YouTube app wants you to become addicted to Shorts and I didn't want to pay for YouTube Music Premium.

Turns out LibreTube fixes all of that.

It is simple yet very feature-rich, and manages to sidestep a lot of the stuff alternatives like NewPipe do by using the YouTube frontend Piped as a middleman (I really want to host my own Piped instance now... even if just to bypass the buginess of login requests and whatnot...).

If you find out that for whatever reason LibreTube is not your cup of tea, however, feel free to use Newpipe instead.
I personally found it to be clunky, but it's a solid alternative (with a few things above LibreTube, even!).

UPDATE 12/15/2024: Please check PipePipe below instead.

PipePipe

The only YouTube client that allows you to watch stuff without requiring to watch a minute's worth of ads and works. It has all NewPipe has (or had) and more.
Please get it immediately.

Markor

Credits tothe official Markor page on GitHub for the image.

Want to write something on your phone? Want to actually have it on your own device?

In the Apple world, you can easily do such by opening up the default Notes app and changing the directory to "On my iPhone/iPad", but such things have to - of course - be harder on Androidland thanks to just how much Google wants you to use their cloud services.

Come Markor.
With not only support for formats ranging from Markdown to Wikitext to CSV, but also easily accessible to-do list and "quick note" functions, document conversion and more, it's easily the note-taking app for Android devices.

And to make the deal even sweeter, it does all of that completely offline - no nasty cloud services, no annoying trackers in the back, either! Woot!

P.D: The first draft of this article was originally written as a Markdown document in Markor.

Aves Libre

screenshot of aves libre image viewer

I had been wanting to create an entry for this app since I first wrote this article, but due to laziness (and not having used mamy of this program's functions back then), I didn't really do it.
Now that I have, I can - and I can say that this app blows Google Photos out of the water - it has everything Google Photos has aside from image editing (and that might be only because I have a Pixel device) alongside support for the occassional weird format like TIFF and AVI and even a sort of screensaver mechanism!

While this app can connect to the internet, this is only necessary to get the map view for photos that have location data - you make sure you scrub the EXIF data off every photo you take, don't you?

Supplements

KOReader

Because books are good for you, and so is KOreader.

But why is KOreader specifically good for the reader in you? Well, it's because (ironically enough) it wasn't even made with Android devices in mind.

At it's core, KOreader is just an open eBook reader replacenent for older or jailbroken Kindles, Kobos and other such e-ink readers.
All it's advantages on Android devices, such as battery use and lightweight size, while also having versatility when it comes to your reading experience and dictionaries of many kinds are because of this lack of focus on Android devices.

If you're questioning me on this, then why do all the Android-first eBook reading apps force you to pay for things KOreaderdoes for absolutely nothing in return?
Thus, KOreader is the app that you must use if you have any interest regarding reading on your phone, the other one being...

UPDATE 12/15/2024: While this app has support for PDF files, I no longer recommend it for reading these as opposed to ePUB/MOBI/AZW3 or even Microsoft Word document files - see the next entry for my recommended PDF reader.

MuPDF Mini

a screenshot of MuPDF mini

I had been using KOReader to read through books on my phone when I suddenly got back into Mesopotamian history, myth and culture.
It didn't take too long for me to find books that could help me get a deeper understanding of the subject - but there was a caveat: all the best books I had managed to find were in PDF format and PDF format only - no ePUBs, no DjVU files, not even HTML pages. PDF only.

And I just went in and plopped them in KOReader, only to find out that KOReader's support for PDF files was rather limited - not unexpected, but also kind of a bummer, since to be unable to zoom into a PDF by just using your fingers, let alone resize the text of a PDF to fit whatever screen you're reading it in; something perfectly doable with ePUBs can and does result in dissappointment.

Thus, I went back into F-Droid and searched for any half-decent PDF reading programs I could use... and found MuPDF-mini, which is as minimal as it's name suggests: it uses the system file picker in order to allow you to open whatever PDF you want to read, then props up a viewr that allows you to... flip through pages without any fancy animations (or to skip them by touching the progress bar), zoom in and out and go back to a "fit width" resolution and access a table of contents. Any more options are exclusive to the "regular" version of MuPDF, which adds annotation and other such functions at the cost of a more bloated experience.

Fun fact: MuPDF also has support for ePUB, CBZ, XPS and FB2. I haven't tested these, but apparently you can change the font size on EPUB and FB2 - I consider that a win.


Mihon

A must have for all of you weebs out there (and the not so weeby too!).

But then, you may ask: Why is it a must have, if the app is completely empty after you install it?

Well, it's thanks to Keiyoushi.

Because, you see; once upon a time, there was an app named Tachiyomi.

Tachiyomi let you configure it in basically whichever way you wanted it to. At initial setup (or so I think, I was stuck on Apple devices through it's entire lifespan, don't trust me on this one.).

A Korean company seethed about it, however, and their complaint led them to separate the app and the extensions, eventually leading to Mihon and Keiyoushi.

In the end, though - nobody really cares about the fact that they're technically separate - the easiest way to get Keiyoushi is by searching "Mihon extensions" on your favorite search engine anyway.

These two, together, should be pretty much able to take care of 99% of your comic reading cases regardless of nationality - it even has XKCD! And even without Keiyoushi, you can still you can organize a whole small library on your phone's storage alone!

If you somehow fall into the 1%, you're doing things wrong. I won't make myself responsible for such cases.

Ankidroid

It's Anki, but on your phone. If you have tried this app, you know what I mean.

Toys

Games tend to be closed source, so I'll skip if it's open source or not unless it IS actually open source.
Similarly, all of these are Play Store only unless said otherwise.

Pokemon Masters EX

For the love of god, don't play this kusoge.
Not only is it a gacha game (duh), but its at the end of its lifespan, and it shows.

I originally promised myself to never get into this game after I first rekindled my childhood obsession with Pokemon, but alas, a Cheren alt happpened and it all ended up like this.
Now all I do is my 5 minutes' worth of dailies and fucking around with Expeditions so I pray I get "Friend Keys" in order to further raise my friendship level with Cheren (whom I love very much, and no, the lodge is no friendship bullshit at all, it's literally a dating simulator for all characters involved that aren't literal gradeschoolers).

Cookie Run: Tower of Adventure

It's like Genshin, but with cookies.
It's Cookie Run: Ovenbreak - Electric Boogaloo.
It also will turn your phone into an oven.

Not to say this game ain't of good taste, but you should play it on PC. Don't cook your phone.

Ensemble Stars! Music

A mediocre game, for people who are definitely not me.

I mean, the rhythm portion is decent, but...
...if you are into this franchise, you should just go back to scrolling endlessly through Instagram on your iPhone and listening to whatever's on the radio.
We'll thank you very much.

PPSSPP

screenshot of PPSSPP

A PSP emulator.
Actually pretty comfy if you ask me, and emulation also opens you up to a lot of older (and frankly, better) games.

Given that the PSP's aspect ratio is similar to that of modern phones in landscape mode, this makes PPSSP particularly comfy. If you have to get only one emulator on your phone, get this one.

Go back to the blog index