I’m sure there are countless apps out there that are incredibly cool, interesting, or useful, but just haven’t hit the mainstream yet. Maybe it’s a productivity tool that’s boosted your efficiency, a unique game that’s kept you entertained for hours, or a niche app that’s catered perfectly to one of your hobbies or interests.
What are some Android hidden gem apps that you’ve used a bunch or think it’s really cool/interesting/useful?
Please share your recommendations, and if possible, a brief description of what the app does and why you find it so valuable.
Looking forward to uncovering some hidden treasures in the Android app world. Thanks in advance for your suggestions!
Droid-ify is a much nicer client for F-Droid.
Obtanium for downloading apps from various other sources.
Aurora Store for anonymously downloading apps from the Play Store without a Google account
LibreTube or NewPipe for watching YouTube videos without ads or tracking.
Seal for downloading YouTube videos.
Retro Music Player - probably the best looking music app for Android.
Pano Scrobbler - a FOSS app for Last.fm, Libre.fm and Listenbrainz. (I recommend Obtanium to download it from GitHub.)
Murglar for downloading Music in full quality from Deezer.
Molly - a better Signal client. (You can use Obtanium to download it from GitHub, you can add their F-Droid repo or download it using Accressent, a new experimental app store that seeks to replace F-Droid.)
Gallery - a simple gallery app that looks good and respects your Material You theme.
Element X is a much better Matrix client than the standard Element app. (I recommend downloading it from GitHub using Obtanium.)
LinkSheet - a small app that restores the old Android URL link chooser. It has many great features like the ability to remove tracking parameters from URLs or using FastForward to annoying bypass URL shorteners.
UntrackMe - a tool that can redirect YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, etc. links to privacy-friendly alternative frontends like Invidious or Piped for YouTube, Nitter for Twitter and LibReddit or Teddit for Reddit
Thunder, the best Lemmy client I ever used.
Most of the apps I mentioned are free and open source and many of them are available on F-Droid. They don’t collect or sell any of your data.
The last one is not an app, but an entire OS that can replace the spyware-infested ROM that’s preinstalled by your phones’ manufacturer. I’m talking about GrapheneOS. No ads, no tracking, no proprietary Google services. Just free and open source software with maximum privacy and security. It’s so great!
Some alternatives and corrections to your list:
Ps: I’ve been seeing a lot of posts and comments by you in the communities that I follow, just want to tell you thx for contrubuting to them xD.
Thanks for participating in the discussion. I have to disagree on some of your point though.
I have found the download features in both LibreTube and NewPipe to be pretty unreliable. Seal always works. NewPipe x SponsorBlock is great, I use LibreTube which also has SponsorBlock built in, I just included NewPipe in the list because LibreTube breaks sometimes. But yes, NewPipe x SponsorBlock is better than standard NewPipe. BraveNewPipe is even better.
Aves is a good option, it’s also available on Accrescent. Personally though, I dislike the design of the app and prefer Gallery in combination with Image Toolbox for image editing.
It’s not open-source and thus not available on F-Droid.
In my experience Spotiflyer has been pretty unreliable. It either pulls low quality shit from YouTube or it tries to download from Spotify and fails. So far, Murglar has worked like a dream. Just like deemix on desktop btw. You can use Deezer Premium ARLs from this guide to log in and download genuine 320kbps MP3s or even FLACs. Never had any issues.
I tried it out, personally, I didn’t really like it. Element has been pretty slow for me, but I never had these issues with Element X.
Thx for the feedback. I agree with pretty much all your points. It just goes down to personnal preference and some feautures.
Absolutely true
This was the most respectful internet debate I’ve ever seen.
Trying to make Lemmy a better place
Excellent list
I’m glad you like it
I didn’t know about most of these, and am playing with several now. Thx!
Have fun! I home some of the tools are useful for you.
ytdlnis as an alternative for seal.
Thanks for the suggestion
Great list overall. Obtainium looks like it could be life-changing. :-)
I try to get most of my apps from F-Droid (through Droid-ify) or Accrescent, but if they are not available, I turn to Obtanium to either download an APK from a website or from GitHub. It also has the ability to update your apps from your custom sources.
I installed it and it is working beautifully. Thank you for the suggestion!
Oh no‽
Seems like FastForward has been put on ice/abandoned by the developers/maintainers (read the project GitHub header).
Any viable/preferred alternative?
The FastForward feature in LinkSheet should continue to work. If you need a solution for your browser, check out the Bypass All Shortlinks Userscript that you can install using Violentmonkey. There are also a couple of websites that can accomplish the same thing, bypass.city and bypass.vip. I got the information from https://fmhy.net/storage#skip-redirect
Hi, have you switched to using Accressent? Do you like it more than Droid-ify?
It’s in a very early stage of development, it currently only offers 11 apps. I really hope it succeeds though, it has better security than F-Droid so I would love to switch to it once it supports more apps.
I’ll keep an eye on it, thanks!
Libretube and Newpipe, can you cast videos to like a Chromecast with these?
If you need Chromecast support, check out SkyTube. It’s very important that you download SkyTube Extra, not SkyTube FOSS because it doesn’t support casting. You can use Obtanium to automatically grab the latest APK from GitHub. It’s also available in the IzzyOnDroid repository on F-Droid.
I’m sorry, why do we need this one?
I have Android 13 and when I tap on a link it asks me what app to open, also you can set this within the settings app per app basis.
Is this like Better Open With?
On many occasions, Android nowadays uses “Verified links” to figure out what app to open instead of prompting the user LinkSheet also provides other cool features that I already described in my previous comment:
Yes
I missed the bypassing URL shorteners, heck, that would have been so helpful to me back in the day when I was sailing the seas for some “obscure” content.