5 open-source alternatives to Google apps

When you purchase a new phone, there are certain quality-of-life applications that you expect to see, features that cater to the daily tasks that we’ve come to consider the bare necessities. Gallery, web browser, navigation, and calendar apps could all be expected software features on our respectable Android phones; their absence would be confusing. Google’s ecosystem provides useful renditions of the above examples, all preinstalled and ready for use upon startup. But users don’t have to settle for all of Google’s baseline services, thanks to the Play Store’s healthy open-source app library.

While you might sacrifice some initial convenience getting into them, open-source services allow users to get under the hood to enhance their experience and engage with the app’s community — and funnel less of your personal data into Google’s algorithms. With real-time development updates and direct channels to the designers for providing feedback, open-source will always bring people together around a great service. Here, we’ve gathered some of our favorite open-source alternatives to the Google services you’ve likely been using for years, in all their community-driven glory.

1 Fossify Gallery

Proud member of a historic fork

Fossify Gallery is an amazing open-source gallery app with sorting, editing, and navigation skills that far outstrip Google Photos. It’s a member of the Fossify app group, a fork of the open-source library formerly known as Simple App Tools before they went premium. A good gallery app allows users to easily manage their image, video, and GIF files, with ample editing tools given through an intuitive interface. The Fossify gallery is unrivaled in its organization features, allowing users to switch between specific image folders and folder formats with little interruption. There’s no cloud storage, but that sort of goes hand in hand with Fossify’s privacy focus.

As an open-source project, Fossify Gallery commits entirely to letting fans get involved with the project’s development, creating avenues to check out other members of the fork and sending feedback to the developer. User bug reports and suggestions are one of the primary ways that the app improves. The Fossify library is awesome in general, and I highly recommend checking it out on GitHub, but Fossify Gallery is particularly well looked after. A sure improvement over the bland afterthought that is Google Photos.

2 OsmAnd

Get a lay of the land

OsmAnd is a polished open-source alternative to Google Maps, which approaches the practice of map reading and journey plotting with a sense of well-needed clarity. The Google Maps app is great, but its visual design can get a little cluttered and unintuitive, making it pretty easy to get turned around when traveling. OsmAnd’s map screen is appealingly sharp, with bright colors and defined lines that reminded me of a subway map. Like Google Maps, the user can navigate around the map representation, marking points of interest with flags that will be saved to a menu for later review. Users can filter what they want to see on the OsmAnd map, which comes in handy when looking for locations, like pharmacies, in densely populated areas.

While it does provide a speed camera warning feature, the app prompts the user immediately to check whether they are legal in their country. The map screen itself can be fully customized, allowing users to toggle widget opacity, 2D to 3D button designs, and distance-by-tap features. Settings can be applied and saved to each travel category, like walking and public transport, as well as copy and paste them into different accounts. If you regularly use Google Maps but want something streamlined that ticks all the same boxes, I would recommend OsmAnd.

3 pCloud

Keep your files safe and sound

One of the best aspects of open-source projects is their dedication to user file security, and pCloud embraces this with a wealth of features designed to earn its users’ peace of mind. As an alternative to Google Drive, pCloud provides an equally tidy and efficient cloud-storage service with greater attention to user privacy. The app allows users to upload various file formats to a secure server, with individual menus dedicated to pdfs, mp3s, pngs, and jpegs. pCloud also permits two or more users to share files over a cloud connection, meaning you can quickly and easily access files made or borrowed by a friend at the touch of a button.

Users can set up a lock feature on the app, meaning multiple layers of security clearance lie between potential infiltrators and your precious data. While Google Drive isn’t exactly an open book, pClouds Sweden-based data protection regulations make it a superior choice for sensitive data.

4 Tor Browser

The genuine open-source web browser

Tor is an open-source web browser that functions like Google Chrome, albeit with a different aptitude. The app is actually a modified version of Mozilla Firefox, with extra measures to ensure that user data sharing is kept to an absolute minimum, usually by disabling default browser settings that websites exploit to track their visitors. The Tor browser is well known for its utility in navigating the dark web, something you cannot do with Google Chrome. It is advised that users proceed with extreme caution if they take this route, as this particular corner of the internet is unregulated and has malicious bodies that might take advantage of carelessness.

Tor is amazing on PC and its Android incarnation is no different, functioning exactly like a regular browser, but with the aforementioned amazing privacy settings. If you’re sick of websites mining your user data while browsing, try Tor.

5 F-Droid

Your one-stop open-source app store

F-Droid is an open-source app marketplace that courts liberated services from all over, platforming wholesale forks of other services and open-source apps. While the Play Store is a great platform for finding some of the best open-source apps, a substantial population builds their success outside Google’s service. Like the Play Store, F-Droid offers a huge Android app library, arranged in categories that sum up its genres and uses. The app has an impressive settings menu, with options to enable and disable Wi-Fi and data automatic downloads, toggle an adaptive dark mode, and even manage settings that connect F-Droid with the Tor browser.

The Play Store isn’t winning any awards for intuitive design, and with its combined creative library and ease of navigation, F-Droid beats it out by a long shot.

Google won’t let you do that

The Play Store can feel like a hopeless venture for some developers, so dominated by big companies and popular apps, it’s almost impossible to stand out. By operating independently, open-source apps can put their users first without fear of any corporate overseers deciding to weigh in. Users also have a chance to be part of the projects they support in ways other than money, which would be extremely out of character for a Google app. The prevalence of mass product library forks also clearly displays that open-source software will always endure, surviving in one form or another. While Google’s core apps will likely always be around, you might find that the uninhibited privacy-centric nature of open-source software suits you better than Google’s limited services.

We’d certainly recommend trying a few open-source apps because they prioritize their users, keeping data safe and movements obscured. As you’ve read, it’s possible to find some open-source apps that sort out your life better than any Google service.