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?
Motioncam is an must have if your phone is powerful enough
F-Droid image gallery. So many useful features, but I use it mostly for automatic galleries and metadata tagging
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).
I think Signal still required phone number for registration, but you no longer have to disclose it to others.
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.”
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?
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.
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.)
Meteogram, super customizable weather app. The subscription or one-time-for-life-payment allows access to all paid weather providers that are currently implemented
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
