Introduction to Free Software Applications for Android Phones

This article introduces you to Free Software for Android Phones. We listed below a number of applications and games for you who love application hunting so you can recognize, appreciate, use and hopefully later contribute to Free Software projects whos the apps you use everyday. We want to connect between Ubuntu and GNU/Linux to Android and the users alike because we all as a whole is one Free Software Community. We started here with explaining what is free software then Ubuntu Touch then F-Droid and the rest of apps and games we believe you will love to use.

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Free software, according to Free Software Community, is every computer program that respects freedom of the user and the community. The name “free software” is often also called “libre software” (borrowing word from Spanish/French) and we do not mean “gratisware”. That means the developer of the program gives every user, both in individual and social ways, full rights to unlimited use, study, modify and share with and without changes, with or without price, completely from its original form (source code) to derived form (binary code). Now let’s start hunting the apps!

If you use Ubuntu, then Ubuntu or more generally GNU/Linux (read here) is the greatest example of Free Software both as operating system and a distribution of tens of thousands Free Software inside it.

Opposite to Free Software is Proprietary Software (meaning program which its copies are “owned” permanently by its developer not the user no matter even if the user have already paid for it) no difference whether it is gratis or paid, it does not respect freedom of the user and the community, thus giving its developer (or “owner”) power over the users, power that no one should have. Learn more about Free Software at The GNU Project.

In the past, Canonical dreamed for Ubuntu Phone and they endeavored to create the operating system, Ubuntu Touch, but they unfortunately did not meet success. Today, Canonical’s dream comes true in the hands of the community project who took over Ubuntu Touch. We saw Ubuntu Touch successfully running on several Android phones already, such as certain series of Xiaomi Poco and Redmi, Fairphone and even Google Pixel (see the official website for more info). We put Ubuntu Touch here because it is the operating system derived from Ubuntu GNU/Linux that can replace Android OS and –although today its hardware support is fairly limited (just like any other project in their early times)–, we believe by time many new contributors will come and make it strong enough to rival Android. Visit their official website https://ubuntu-touch.io.

~ Starting here applications that you can install on your Android phone. ~

The Android app store for Free Software. If you used Play Store for a long time, you might have not been realizing that it is proprietary software in itself and most of apps offered in it are also proprietary. If you want freedom, you should escape and once you know this, you can start installing F-Droid and prefer to install apps and games from it. To install it, visit https://www.f-droid.org.

Alternative recommendation: download apps from their official websites.

Apple Flinger is a game to shoot cute birds using apples and a flinger and this game will remind everyone to Angry Birds (proprietary and further known as malware). You can play this alone (vs computer) or in 2 players mode (vs a friend). You will shoot an apple to hit green birds sitting on wooden boxes until nothing left. Sometimes you will hit, sometimes you will miss. And it’s fun! Apple Flinger is a good example of Free Software games for Android.

Document Viewer is a PDF reader. It is small, lightweight, fast, highly customizable and has a bookshelf view (of recently reads) at the start. It can also read multiple other formats including DjVU, EPUB, XPS, Comic Books CBZ, and Fiction Books FB2. We picked this as everyone needs to read PDF and to help you avoid using proprietary software or even another problem called SaaSS such as Google Docs or WPS.

[ Available on F-Droid ]

Material Files is a file manager. It is a must-have app, because if you avoid the preinstalled one (because it is proprietary software), you must have a replacement, and fortunately Material Files is far better. It has all file management features like showing files, folders, SDCard, creating new file and folder, copy and paste, with and without preview, with and without hidden files. It also has ability to read/write to SDCard (even if you use an older Android version e.g. 5.0 “Lollypop”) so you can also delete and rename files in it, while other file manager (like what we recommend Open Explorer Beta) cannot.

[ Available of F-Droid ]| Alternative recommendation: Open Explorer Beta.

Firefox is the free software web browser from our community and the official one on Ubuntu. All great browsers mentioned here are actually modified versions of Firefox. It is available on the official website Mozilla.org and in fact, not available on F-Droid. To install Firefox, visit https://www.mozilla.org.

[ Available on Mozilla Website ] | Alternative recommendation: Fennec F-Droid | Tor Browser | Iceraven | FFupdater

Fennec F-Droid is a modified version of Firefox but without Mozilla Foundation trademark, cleaned from proprietary software bits and a lot of security and privacy improvements. We include it here to help you understand an example of Free Software when a disagreement occurs, anyone can make a modified version (on enhancement) and then publish it under a different name. That’s impossible with proprietary software. That’s exactly what happened between Firefox and Fennec.

Kakugo
is an application to learn Japanese through quizzes and it is well-put together. It makes it
possible for a complete beginner to learn Hiragana (and later Katakana and even
Kanji) very quickly by questions and answers. First you will learn to read them. Then,
you can even learn to write them by finger drawing on screen. And, you can also learn the meaning!

[ Available on F-Droid ]

KDE Connect, from KDE Project and widely known as part of Kubuntu, is an amazing pair of applications that connect your phone to your laptop via wifi. It enables your phone to me a remote control, as well as transfer files both ways very quickly, not to mention you can use it for public presentation, too. For Ubuntu GNOME users, don’t worry, you can install GSConnect extension to make your system work in pair with your Android phone that uses KDE Connect.

It
is an alternative launcher which we believe every user would love once
they tried it and would never need another launcher anymore. Why?
Because it (1) enables rotation as a launcher and (2) search by name to
launch every application and (3) history of recently/frequently launched
app so it feels more comfortable and effective for daily phone use
compared to any preinstalled one. We think it is very clever. You can
try it yourself!

[ Available on F-Droid ]

Newpipe (perhaps means the new “tube”) is a YouTube-client application that is small, fast, free of advertisements, able to download both video and audio aside from subtitles, and able to create own playlists as well as playing in the background. We are very grateful to Newpipe developers to enable us watching videos at YouTube clean from worries (nonfree JavaScript issues, ads, Google recording our activities), not to mention it is lighter and more friendly to hardware resource.

[ Available on F-Droid ] | Alternative recommendation: Clipious | PipePipe

OpenMultiMaps (see also our recommendation OsmAnd~) is a Free Software maps application alternative to Google Maps which uses map data from Open Street Map (OSM), our community free maps created in the same spirit as our free encyclopedia, Wikipedia, together serve the world by respecting users’ freedom and privacy.

[ Available on F-Droid ] | Alternative recommendation: OsmAnd~

Telegram
is the full featured messaging application that is the most popular in
the world from our community. It is the sole competitor to WhatsApp
today with latest number of active users being 1 billion people every
month, while being licensed under a Free Software license GNU GPL, also
offers same features to WhatsApp. Although it is available on F-Droid with another name “Telegram FOSS”, we strongly recommend you install it from official website https://telegram.org by downloading its APK and install it manually.

[ Available on Telegram Official Website ] | Alternative recommendation: Element Mobile | Signal | Conversations | Threema Libre | Wire | Deltachat | GNU Jami

Termux is a small, minimum system Ubuntu GNU/Linux Terminal that enables Android Phone user to work like using a real Ubuntu computer by using GNU Bourne Again Shell (bash) and other command lines like the APT Package Manager. This app is super famous among many people who like to tinker with their computer and phone and this includes even Windows users who curious to learn GNU/Linux command lines. Just imagine by using your Android phone, you can do a lot of your Ubuntu commands and install Ubuntu packages almost exactly like using your real Ubuntu laptop.

[ Available on F-Droid ] | Alternative recommendation: UserLAnd | Nix-on-Droid

Lastly in this listing, Video LAN Client (VLC) is the most popular multimedia player known by everyone using computer today. You can play audio (mp3, ogg) as well as videos (mp4, mkv, ogv, webm) while making custom playlists and even customizations as you wish. All works without ads nor unnecessary troubles.

[ Available on F-Droid ] | Alternative recommendation: MPV | Nova | Next Player

Finally, there are still a lot of Free Software applications and games out there and their number is still increasing! We gave you a lot of clues above so you can explore yourself a lot of another clues and even join the development activities. To close this listing, we would love to thank all Free Software developers especially those whose apps mentioned above, you all have done great jobs! Now to dear readers, happy application hunting!

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