Great Google-free Android Apps

I want to dispel the misconception that using an Android phone means living within Google’s panopticon of data collection and advertising. This is very not true! For the past 8+ years I have used an Android phone without any direct relationship with Google or any of their services (e.g. the Play store). My phone’s (and tablet’s) operating system, and now the apps, all come from elsewhere. I also want to show that this arrangement is highly usable for many people, if not quite for everyone.

The next post will focus on my devices and their operating system. There I will further argue that a setup like mine provides the most autonomy, privacy, and possibly security¹ of any phone you can use in 2025. But this post is about the apps that I use. Any Android phone or tablet can run these, even if it still has the Google-laden operating system that it came with. You can try one app at a time to incrementally wean yourself from proprietary ecosystems.

Every app on this list is:

• Respectful of your attention, as it does not contain advertising.
• Respectful of your privacy, as it does not collect user data.
  • (A few apps try to collect anonymous usage metrics but you can decline these.)
• Installable without Google, from somewhere other than the Play Store.
• Usable without any of Google’s proprietary services (Play Services) existing on your phone.
• Open-source, so that (among other benefits!) anyone can verify the above claims are true.
• Offered completely free of charge, though for several of them, I make a recurring donation to the developer. I recommend you do the same if you find their software useful!

Now for the list, organized by function.

App ‘Stores’

F-Droid is an open-source app store for other open-source apps. Everything below comes from F-Droid unless noted otherwise. F-Droid even has an “Anti-Features” label showing when an app is technically open-source but does things which (in the F-Droid maintainers’ opinion) violate the spirit of open-source software.

Obtainium is a way to install (and automatically update) apps whose developer publishes the app as releases in a GitHub repository. We need Obtainium because publishing an app on F-Droid requires more effort than some developers have the appetite for. (It is very little work to host your app on GitHub.)

I also get a few apps directly from the developer’s website (where noted below). An Android app is just an APK file that you can download and install from the web.

As an aside, I’ll mention Aurora Store as a way to obtain apps from the Google Play Store without using a Google account or Google’s software. But this is not required to obtain any of the apps below.

Web Browsing and Search

Firefox is uniquely great on Android because you can install the same extensions as the desktop version, while most mobile browsers don’t support extensions at all. uBlock Origin is my most important extension because it removes advertising and tracking, making the web a more humane place. I also use Leechblock to prevent myself from visiting sites where I’m prone to wasting time. Firefox does try to collect user data (“telemetry”) but you can opt out of this (under Settings -> Data Collection). Anyway, install Firefox via Obtainium (or alternatively, Aurora Store).

Firefox is particularly load-bearing for me because I use exclusively a web browser to deal with banks, airlines, the occasional ride share, and so forth. A company can collect a lot less of the sort of information that you may not wish to share when you interact with them through the sandbox of a web browser (particularly one with extensions that block various tracking methods), than when you install their proprietary native app. This is especially true if that app requires permissions to (e.g.) run in the background, see your location, and so forth.

A lot of companies’ messaging is highly optimized to impart the belief that you must use their proprietary (and Google-services-dependent) app in order to interact with them. In reality, there is usually a mobile-friendly website that you can go slightly out of your way to use instead. (Yes, you can summon an Uber with only a web browser, not the Uber app!) Occasionally you need to “Request Desktop Site” or find an obscure button. In the yet-rarer situation that their proprietary native app is truly the only option, I will vote enthusiastically with my wallet for one of their competitors instead.

If not using Google’s services on my phone, you’re likely wondering how I search the web. Kagi is my enthusiatic answer. You can set it as your default search engine in Firefox, no app needed.²

Communication

Signal, the great encrypted messaging and video calling app. I started using Signal in 2016 when only my partner and a few turbo-nerd friends were on there. A decade later I have conversations with hundreds of Signal contacts, and spend hours per month on Signal calls. It’s as secure and private as anything gets, and (unlike the old days) has a highly polished UX. Install it via this page and it will self-update (or alternatively, via Obtainium or Aurora store).

Jitsi Meet for Jitsi video calls (similar to Zoom but it’s open-source).

Element lets me talk to people on Matrix.

What about email? I’m a happy Fastmail customer. Fastmail provides an excellent Progressive Web App (PWA) that runs in Firefox, but looks like a native app with its own home screen icon. (In years past I used K-9 Mail as a native email client, and it was fine.)

Digital Brain

Markor is a text editing app that I use to take notes in Markdown format. (It’s how I’m writing this blog post right now.) I previously used Joplin but had some nitpicks.

Etar is my calendar app. I also use DAVx⁵ to synchronize my calendar and contacts with my CalDAV + CardDAV server (and other devices), and ICSx⁵ to display calendars hosted by Microsoft Exchange (i.e. Outlook 365).

Mapping

Organic Maps is a privacy-friendly mapping and navigation app.³ It downloads map data for the region(s) you need, then works fully offline. In my experience, apps like these tend to be either confusingly feature-burdened (e.g. OsmAnd) or missing critical features (like navigation), and Organic Maps is neither! You get routing and turn-by-turn navigation, with optional voice prompts via an integration with SherpaTTS. One downside is that you don’t get real-time traffic information, so if you’re driving it’s prone to sending you onto a jammed-up highway at rush hour. (In a pinch, one could open Google Maps in Firefox and look at the live traffic there.) But my navigation needs are mostly walking and cycling in a city that I moved to pretty recently. It does a great job of this, and a decent job for driving, on the occasion that I do it. Sometimes I’ll keep my phone in a shirt pocket and have it shout directions at me while cycling.

Media Consumption

AntennaPod downloads and plays podcasts. Yes, it’s not iTunes or Spotify or whatever. But most podcasts offer an RSS feed which Antennapod will happily consume. The RSS experience can be much better than the first-party podcast options from, say, an extremely-well-known newspaper which gate access to older podcast episodes behind a paywall.

NewPipe plays videos and music from YouTube. It improves on the default YouTube experience with ad blocking, first-class support for playing in the background, downloading videos (or just the audio from videos), and separately adjustable pitch and speed. (See also PipePipe? I’m unsure what differentiates them.)

VLC plays music stored locally on my phone. It’s also a solid app for playing video files.

Fossify Gallery is a nice way to review photos I’ve taken.

Text Input and Recording

FUTO Keyboard is an excellent keyboard app with fully-offline voice typing using the excellent Whisper speech recognition model. I can talk into the phone and my words usually appear just as I said them. FUTO Keyboard is also a great, customizable regular keyboard. (How tall do you want it? Long-press symbol legends? Drag across the spacebar to move the cursor? Yes!) The one downside is that if you want to use swipe input it’s quite under-baked and inaccurate. But the voice typing is super fast and surprisingly accurate for happening completely on-device. You need to add FUTO’s repository to F-Droid in order to install FUTO keyboard that way, but it’s not difficult, and they offer several alternative ways to install it.

Fossify Voice Recorder records voice memos and other audio.

Data Synchronization

Syncthing-Fork synchronizes files between my phone, tablet, and computer. This includes my photos, music, text notes, password database, and Signal chat backups. (It’s part of my data backup strategy as well.) Overall Syncthing fills a similar niche for me that Google Drive, iCloud, Dropbox, etc. do for others.

KDE Connect lets me share the clipboard (and several other things) with my computer (Debian 13 running GSConnect).

Passwords and Security

Password Store to access my password database, synchronized between devices via Syncthing. (Password Store also requires OpenKeychain.) This is a turbo nerd way way to manage passwords; I wouldn’t recommend it for most folks.

Aegis Authenticator to manage TOTP multi-factor authentication keys.

Turbo Nerding

Termux is a terminal emulator and complete Debian-derived userland environment, all with the Android app. If you want your phone or tablet to run the same things that a Linux-based computer does in a terminal, Termux can get you there for a surprisingly huge set of command-line software. If you’re familiar at all with Ubuntu Linux, you can often type pkg install thing rather than apt install thing to get the same software, and you may then recognize what an impressive accomplishment Termux is.

As one example, I use Ollama inside of Termux to run large language models (Qwen 3 variants of admittedly modest size). So Termux can get you a fully self-contained, offline ChatGPT-like experience inside your phone!

Miscallaneous

Pineapple Lock Screen shows a button on the home screen so I can lock my phone without pressing the mechanical power button. (I don’t want to wear out my power button.)

By now, I hope you’re noticing a theme. All of these apps act, first and foremost, at the user’s direction and in the user’s own interests. In the words of a very young Steve Jobs, they support the device’s role as a “bicycle of the mind”, amplifying your own intellect and capabilities moreso than replacing them. They are not trying to be a pacifier, a salesperson, or an agent of a mass surveillance apparatus. There is no micro-targeted algorithmic content curation to turn you into an anxious couch potato (though you can certainly find that via Firefox or NewPipe if you go looking for it). To a much greater extent than is typical, they put the user in control of their digital life.

Reader, I’d like to hear from you in at least two scenarios. The first is if all of this is new to you, and you have a specific need that a proprietary app currently fulfills, but you’d like to find another strategy to meet that need, maybe I can help. The second is if you recognize most of these apps, and are surprised that something did not make my list. What else should I know about?