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I have a lot of proprietary apps on my Android phone, and I’m not able to get rid of every single one. I’m also But there are a lot of apps I have that I don’t need anymore. So for the #30DayFOSSChallenge I decided to go through and uninstall proprietary things I don’t need. There’s too many to discuss every single one, so I’ll make note of the apps I found replacements for and the ones I couldn’t get rid of.

Apps I had to keep

Some of the pre-installed Google apps can’t be removed, so these will have to stick around until I buy a new phone or re-flash this one (which is likely soon because the Pixel 5 is not far from end-of-life): Android Auto, Calculator, Calendar, Camera, Chrome (ugh), Contacts, Files, Gmail (really?), Maps, Messages, Phone, Photos, Pixel Tips, Play Store, Settings. There seems to be very little logic as to which apps are and are not essential.

I rely on Discord to access a lot of communities, so I opted to keep it. Unfortunately, F-Droid does not have any clients for Discord.

I opted to keep Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Drive because I still often find myself opening documents and files in them. I could use the web UIs, but that’s not much better, and doesn’t work as well. I hesitated a bit about uninstalling Google Wallet as well, but I never use it.

There’s a MIDI player I have installed on my phone, that I still occasionally use. It’s just an entertainment app and I could just record all the MIDIs I want to OGGs, but I’m keeping it installed for now anyway. Nothing in F-Droid seems to be a good alternative, though I could potentially make one. It’s probably the least essential app I’m keeping.

Some classes at my university require iClicker, so I kept that.

Microsoft Teams and Zoom are apps I regularly need for school and work meetings. I removed Google Meet, which oddly had two separate apps, because I hadn’t used it in a while, but I may have to reinstall it.

I used Google Stacks as a document scanner in a pinch, and it was commonly needed. Open Note Scanner from F-Droid would seem to be an alternative, but it freezes on startup. Oh well.

I routinely use the Bandcamp app, and Spotify for songs I can’t find on Bandcamp, so I’ve left those alone. Spotify Stations however, was not something I used at all. I’m not sure why I installed it.

I had a COVID exposure notification app installed, but I’d never been notified by it, which surprises me. Turns out, I never enabled it. I’ve opted to enable it, and keep it, for the sake of safety. My bank and hospital have a proprietary phone apps, which are necessary for obvious reasons. (Though, maybe they have a web UI?) I rely on ridesharing to go long distances, so I opted to keep Uber and Lyft, and several local transportation services have apps of their own, which I need once in a while. Seems my local community hasn’t gotten fully on the open-source bandwagon like I have.

Apps I found replacements for!

It might be odd to worry about proprietary games, but I found Antimine to be a perfect alternative to the Minesweeper implementation I was using. Last time I tried installing it, it crashed on startup, but it works almost perfectly now and it’s very pretty!

I had Google Authenticator, Authy, and Duo installed for 2FA with GitLab, Twitch, and my job respectively. I can’t get rid of the latter two, because I still need those accounts and they don’t seem to support other authentication methods. GitLab can be used with a variety of authenticator apps, though, so I went looking on F-Droid to see if there’s something I can use to replace Google Authenticator. The first app I tried was Mauth and it worked pretty much perfectly as a drop-in replacement. I even like some of its choices a little more. I haven’t used GitLab in a while, though, so I’m not sure how much I’ll use.

To replace Google Translate, I installed Translate You. I might have to reinstall GTranslate later if it doesn’t work well enough, this is probably the boldest replacement I am making.

Hopefully I can further improve the FOSS proportions on my phone after this. For now, I’ve made some great progress in that direction in just the past hour!