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!

  • Free Palestine 🇵🇸@sh.itjust.works
    22·
    1 year ago

    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!

    • Xavier@lemmy.ca
      2·
      1 year ago

      Oh no‽

      Seems like FastForward has been put on ice/abandoned by the developers/maintainers (read the project GitHub header).

      Any viable/preferred alternative?

      • Free Palestine 🇵🇸@sh.itjust.works
        1·
        1 year ago

        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.

    • Jvrava9@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      1·
      1 year ago

      Some alternatives and corrections to your list:

      • You can already download YT videos in LibreTube and NewPipe, speaking about NewPipe, I would suggest using NewPipeSponsosblock for blocking in video sponsors from creators. Aves Libre is a better advanced Gallery alternative with EXIF editing.
      • Aimp is a good alternative to Retro.
      • Spotiflyer is an alternative Murglar.
      • Schildi Chat is a better alternative to Element X, its based on Element but is a lot faster and has a lot more options.

      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.

      • Free Palestine 🇵🇸@sh.itjust.works
        2·
        1 year ago

        Thanks for participating in the discussion. I have to disagree on some of your point though.

        You can already download YT videos in LibreTube and NewPipe, speaking about NewPipe, I would suggest using NewPipeSponsosblock for blocking in video sponsors from creators.

        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 Libre is a better advanced Gallery alternative with EXIF editing

        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.

        Aimp is a good alternative to Retro.

        It’s not open-source and thus not available on F-Droid.

        Spotiflyer is an alternative Murglar.

        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.

        Schildi Chat is a better alternative to Element X, its based on Element but is a lot faster and has a lot more options.

        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.

    • kratoz29@lemm.eeEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      LinkSheet](https://github.com/1fexd/LinkSheet)

      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?

      • Free Palestine 🇵🇸@sh.itjust.works
        1·
        1 year ago

        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.

        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:

        It has many great features like the ability to remove tracking parameters from URLs or using FastForward to annoying bypass URL shorteners

        Is this like Better Open With?

        Yes

        • kratoz29@lemm.eeEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          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.

  • Dizzy Devil Ducky@lemm.eeEnglish
    9·
    1 year ago

    Not sure how hidden it is, but I’ve been using Librera FD for the PDF of the textbook I needed for one of my classes. I only really ever use it for the PDF reading function and the search for certain words function, but it works great for what I need.

    I also don’t know how hidden it is, but I also like Anuto TD (Another Ugly Tower Defense for Android) has been something I just got back into. It’s simple and fun enough to play since it doesn’t require too much thought.

    • Aido@lemmy.world
      1·
      1 year ago

      The built-in Nearby Share has a desktop client from Google now if you have a phone that supports it

  • BeatTakeshi@lemmy.world
    7·
    1 year ago

    Mixplorer, a file explorer that does everything. Want to share a file between android devices on your home network over WiFi because Bluetooth will take a million years ? Start a server via mixplorer, send from mixplorer on the other device. The other day I was looking for an app to browse a simple nas storage. I searched for “nas” in F-droid and found nothing. Then I remembered good old mixplorer. Yup there it was, add smb. And I think I barely use 10% of its capacity. Batch processing, queued actions, regex renaming… Many add ons. Edit:free on xda

  • Poringo@lemmy.zip
    3·
    1 year ago

    NeverTooManyBooks.

    I have several books cases and shelves where I store books, this has helped me a lot to have a catalogue of them.

    I just scan the book code, the app gets book info, and I assign it to a place where it is physically stored, like, bookcase 1 in office room, shelf 3 on main room, etc.

    I have it installed from Droid-ify which is like an app to have more sources for f-Droid.

    https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/apk/com.hardbacknutter.nevertoomanybooks

    • kratoz29@lemm.eeEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      Doing inventory of your physical stuff seems like a chore, but a very rewarding one for sure.

      This is a pretty neat idea to be honest, I wonder if it exists for other kinds of media?

      • Baku@aussie.zoneEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Strangely enough I find a bit of joy in doing things like that. I’ve got several books of paperwork I’ve been gradually scanning and organising in a paperless ngx setup. It’s a big hassle that ultimately doesn’t help me much at all (95% of the things in there are random things I could just get rid of and would never miss), but yet I do it anyway, and enjoy doing it

        • kratoz29@lemm.eeEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          Yeah, I have actually thought about using paperless as well, but just the idea of beginning keeps me away lol.

          I also think it is a chore because inventory used to be one of my work functions in a former job.

  • xttweaponttx@sh.itjust.works
    2·
    1 year ago

    I’ve been using Seeker to get hi def flacs for my music library since I decided Spotify sucks a little while back!

    Since I’ve flipped to offline music, it’s been a dream to return to the forever glorious Poweramp music player. Gorgeous & compatible with a buncha skins from the play store, but best of all, you can setup profile based EQs that’ll trigger based on song, album, Bluetooth device, genre… It’s wild

    For podcasts I use Feeder on my RSS feeds & AudioAnchor as my player. Straightforward & operable from my pocket, which is all I need!

    Keepass2android is a great password manager that does biometric auth & slick password generation. File based tho, be sure to sync it somewhere.

  • VitabytesDev@feddit.nl
    2·
    1 year ago

    Arity, the perfect calculator. I know that it is just a calculator app but it lightweight, open-source, has 2D and 3D graphing (!) and of course can do calculations.

  • Bebo@literature.cafeEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Tidy panel 3 for hiding un-dismissable notifications from notification panel (for my Samsung phone). Icon pack studio for generating custom icon packs.

    • Squizzy@lemmy.world
      2·
      1 year ago

      I have a Samsung and it’s not a problem anymore but in the Note 4 days I would get 50+ notifications a day to give access to Samsung calendar and then when I force removed the app it held a notification there about a calendar issue.

      • Bebo@literature.cafeEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        I keep my phone on dnd 24/7 and for some reason in Samsung there will be an un-dismissable notification for that which would also show up in the top of my phone. I found this super annoying so tidy panel 3 is great for hiding this. This wasn’t a problem on my old stock android phone.

  • polarpear11@lemmy.world
    1·
    1 year ago

    Minimalist Phone has changed my life. For anyone looking to either spend less time on social media or get rid of the digital clutter constantly bombarding you, this app is amazing.

    It Filters my notifications so I can check them on my own time, it sets time limits on all social media and game apps and kicks you out when time is up, and it has a simple black background with no app icons, only the names of the apps you choose in white letters. Perfect for my over-stimulated adhd brain.