Personally paid for Niagara launcher as I find that to be the far superior launcher to any other I’ve tried. My second one is Symfonium, the most feature rich and well developed audio player.
What are yours?
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FX as an explorer replacement when Xiaomi put pubs in theirs.
You have a free version too, I don’t even use the “pro” stuff just wanted to contribute.
Smart Audio Book Player. I listen to a lot of audio books and this one was more than worth the €2.39 I paid. So many features I love it.
Grayjay. Can’t watch YouTube without it.
Slay the Spire
Don’t tell me this! I have it on my steam deck and it is addictive enough. I had no idea it was available on android. I am going to try and pretend I didn’t read this.
I’ve put 400 hours in on phone alone from public transit commutes.
It’s coming for you… I’ve already bought it and played it all the way through on pc, switch, and android
Also Balatro
Not today, Satan.
I’ve been playing it and it’s definitely fun but it’s not as sticky as StS imo. There’s too much randomness and not enough control. At least compared to sts
That game is tons of fun, but I suck at it.
I wonder if it ever goes on sale. I added it to my Google playstore wishlist to keep tabs.
Heads up: Nova launcher got sold out to a shady company - Branch Analytics.
Thanks for the warning, I didn’t know about that. That’s disappointing news.
Are there any good free software alternatives?
I used Nova forever. It was great.
I switched to Total launcher and now I don’t miss nova.
And laid off all but one person. Source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/08/nova-launcher-savior-of-cruft-filled-android-phones-is-on-life-support/
Someone in Ars comments linked this:
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/fr.neamar.kiss/
Any experiences?
My Android paid must haves are: Titanium Backup (for scheduled backups and quick recovery), Threema (Messenger) and airMusic (former AirAudio, stream from mobile to e.g. Sonos).
What makes Threema better than Signal?
I am not aware of any advantage, but my family and friends are using either Threema, Signal or Telegram. So I use all three of them.
Why Threema?
Currently limited to groups chats of 256 participants and group calls of 16 participants
For privacy, freedom, and control, iOS is out. As with Telegram, I advise staying away from the Google variant and highly recommend the Threema Libre implementation for Android. Licenses are not compatible across variants, so stick with the Threema Shop!
- Open source full E2EE (end-to-end encryption) platform with regular security audits
- Mobile clients can be linked to Threema Desktop/Web
- Source code available for Android, iOS, Desktop, and Web
- Threema Libre implementation for Android
- Liberated from Google Services, uses Threema Push for instant delivery
- Reproducible builds
- Available via F-Droid repository
- Simplified (normal human-understandable) Changelog
- Multiple ways to purchase through Threema Shop
- With or without Email Address
- Cash, Bitcoin, Mastercard, Visa, or bank transfer - Can leave every non-payment field blank!
- 4.99 CHF, EUR, or USD per license
- Pay anonymously with cash (rounded nearest 10, buy in multiples of 2)
The largest criticism levied against Threema:
- 2023010? - Accusation - Three Lessons from Threema - Analysis of a Secure Messenger
- 20230109 - Rebuttal - Statement on ETH Findings
- 20230110 - Coverage - Messenger billed as better than Signal is riddled with vulnerabilities
“While some of the findings presented in the paper may be interesting from a theoretical standpoint, none of them ever had any considerable real-world impact,” the post stated. “Most assume extensive and unrealistic prerequisites that would have far greater consequences than the respective finding itself.”
Its business model and not requiring a phone number
I think Signal still required phone number for registration, but you no longer have to disclose it to others.
Signal still has that PII tho
+1 for AirMusic. I use it for my snapcast multi-room streaming setup.
Last time I used Titanium Bckup it was losing compatibility and I moved on to Neo Backup. Did Titanium get updated again ad some point or something?
Latest version I know is 8.4.0.2 from 2020-05-16 downloaded from here http://www.matrixrewriter.com/android/files/TitaniumBackup_latest.apk.
I use Titanium since Android 4 and had indeed some troubles (related to storage access rights) on Android 11. After solving those, Titanium ran fine like on older versions of Android. Did not yet try Titanium on newer versions than Android 11.
Thank you for the hint and link to Neo Backup, I will give it a try. (Ah, just saw it is an incarnation of OAndBackup, nice.)
Hope it works for you, since other comments also mentioned Titanium having issues and being unmaintained.
This weekend my first scheduled backups were due during the night, and unfortunately I found my phone in recovery next morning. It was now in kind of “boot loop”, resetting shortly after logging into the phone.
Could stop this by quickly killing NeoBackup processes after login. Neo tried to again run the scheduled task each time, most likely as they before failed/did not run through.
So in summary it looks like my Lineage 18 device has issues with the scheduled backups of Neo.
Strange thing is that all my manual tests, even the same as configured for the scheduled tasks, worked perfectly fine. Just today’s first fully automatic runs seemed to make trouble (maybe cause mobile phone was in standby?)
Can only guess, but will keep Titanium for now on the older devices, and will keep Neo in mind for newer versions of Android, on which Titanium will not work any more :)
Sorry to hear about that. I’ve been using Neo for a while and never had issues like that. Might be because your Android version is a bit older maybe. Hopefully it works on your future devices then.
Also maybe report the bug to the developer in whichever way they use for this project.
Titanium Backup hasn’t been updated in five years, and I think that update was just to meet requirements to stay on the store. Their last changelog entry is adding the menu icon after Android ditched the physical menu button. There are a bunch of settings that are broken or do nothing due to changes to Android over the decades (TB has been around for so long that it supports Android 1.5).
I’ve been using Swift Backup as a replacement these past few years. It’s closed source but was recommended to me, and I haven’t run into any problems yet. Is Neo better in some way, aside from being FOSS?
I’ve heard of Swift Backup but never tried it because I think it was paid or automatic backups were a paid feature or something. But for my simple needs Neo Backup has been perfect.
Yeah, it’s twelve bucks to unlock scheduled backups and cloud syncing in Swift Backup, but then again this post is about paid apps. :)
Which is perfectly fair. I just tend to be stingy about paying for apps when there’s a free one that does what I need.
Nothing wrong with paying for something that’s worth it, though.
Titanium has been abandoned for years. Swift backup is what I switched to, or DataBackup on GitHub if you want a free option.
RadarScope Pro is the first that came to my mind. I don’t live in tornado country anymore, but got plenty of use out of it when I did
I bought blackplayer EX a while ago because it was a great music player but now it seems to be abandonded with the last update being a year ago and I have started encountering some issues.
Poweramp still going strong ten years later.
it was nova launcher pro till they fucked the dev team down to 1 dev who does everything so I moved to lawn chair because I can’t trust that the project is going to stay alive.
Sirin audiobook reader.
The only paid app that I have is Moon+ Reader Pro.
I read a boatload of ebooks on my device, and this has been my ebook-reader of choice for a while. I found it to be so good that I did the IAP, and stopped using Librera Reader.
For all that matters, I am a huge supporter of FOSS apps (that’s the reason I have only one paid app lol) - but Moon+ reader Pro beats Librera in two areas - Librera is pretty slow when it tries to open a huge file, and Librera also can’t download book covers like Moon+ does.
The Royal Spanish Academy’s dictionary, most likely. While I can easily have conversations in Spanish, the similarities with my mother language every once in a while make me get words confused, specially in conjugation (why does B and V need to sound so similar…). I’ve had it for a while, and although it was a bit pricey, it has saved me quite a few times from awkward mix ups. Also bonus points for working completely offline (looking at you, Yomiwa dictionary…), and having no problems being sideloaded into vanilla Android systems.
RealCalc
It’s a really nice calculator.
I have this one. It’s the best Android calculator I’ve used.
I love the widget feature. You can add a whole calculator to your home screen, I have it taking up my second page, so whenever I need a calculator I swipe across once and it’s there.
ISS detector pro
Poweramp, IMO the UX is excellent and it has tons of powerful features. No other music player I’ve tried comes close.
