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Is there any proprietary Android app for which you wish there would be an open-source alternative? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Basically, what the title says. Do you use any app, that is proprietary, but either has no OSS alternatives or they're all not good enough? If there is an alternative, what keeps you from switching?

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago (3 children)

People have hit on most of them here, but here is another big one:

Fitness apps. Mainly calorie tracking, workout tracking and heart rate tracking

Health app

Sleep as Android

(No, gadget bridge is not a replacement for 99% of cases and doesn't even support the gold standard for heart rate tracking, polar H10)

For calorie tracking, the massive food databases required, barcode scanning, and crowd sourcing are generally not compatible with the open source community's privacy ideals. OpenNutriTracker has promise though!

For workout tracking, none of them have any device support and most of them are dead and abandoned. Not to mention heart rate zones, stats and training trends, etc... FitoTrack and Opentracks are good starts though.

And then a google fit alternative. Something that can integrate sleeping, workouts, heart rates, sensors, etc.. Data all in one aggregates place. It is a huge task and it makes sense that there is no open source alternative for it. Especially when the components aren't individually there to aggregate.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

I was looking for Sleep As Android too!! Separately to this I saw a comment on R a while ago asking for FOSS alternatives, and to say the dev's response was out-of-touch would be an understatement. They just complained about not being able to make a living from a FOSS app...

Regarding Gadgetbridge though, those devs and contributors are running into more and more accessories using encrypted protocols which is a bit worrying. Right now I've settled on the BangleJS which has official support, just wish it had a more accurate heart rate sensor!

My dream FOSS health app would be some concoction of OpenScale and Gadgetbridge 😂

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

Sleep As Android is hands down the #1 app on my phone I cannot give up. It's THE reason I could never switch to Apple. I've gone beyond basic use and now have it automating things based on sleep actions and I kind of love it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

I hadn’t heard of opennutritracker before but it seems cool. Cleanslate is also good, and you can even self host it (although tbf I haven’t tried). Seems like people are working on the calorie tracking side of things!