Imo where f-droid suffers is in the lack of apps. As in, there are not that many of them which in my case at least leads to there not being equivalents for some more more niche and specialized apps, and generally there being less diversity of apps. Of course this is to be expected as f-droid is less known than google play, and also offers no monetary incentive, but still I feel like that is an issue and as such I hope that more developers create FOSS apps and share them on f-droid. As for apps that I actually use from there, they of course are high quality. The fact that there's no ads by itself makes them better than 99% of playstore trash
@@alanbrownjohn4854 I used Amaze, too but switched to Material files. Idk about the two tabs function - I've never needed it but I just saw that Material files can open a second window.
I was quite concerned about software security and privacy for years, but never knew where to start. Your channel helped me immensely in that regard. Thank you.
I recently discovered F-Droid and I love it. I wish I knew about this forever ago as you can get apps that function, don't have ads, and respect your privacy as a bonus. When I reflash my phone's OS this weekend I'm going to definitely rely on F-Droid more.
@@anobody4606 ROMs available vary from phone to phone. I'm currently on a port of ProtonAOSP for my Oneplus 6T and I like it. I've heard Pixel Experience and LineageOS are good too. LineageOS is most likely going to be the easiest one to install and is most likely to be available for most devices.
Would recommend Droid-ify as an f-droid client, just for the syncing performance, it also comes with a list of repos, including the ones listed on this video, for you to enable if you want edit: typos
Activity watch is also on Desktop and has many features. I use it to track what programs I have open and even what projects im working in down to the time spent in each script. Great to show as proof for school that in fact, I did just spend 140hrs instead of the 60 required.
Thanks to your earlier videos on f-droid and smartphone privacy (I think it was the 'get fit for free' one where you talked about f-droid apps for fitness), I learned of it and finally decided to try it out. I'm no tech guy, and I imagined that tinkering with third-party apps, sideloading etc would not only be difficult for me but also pose a security vulnerability, but from own experience I am glad to have been proven wrong. I will definitely try and make my new phone more privacy-oriented in the future, I will see about installing custom OS like graphene next. Perhaps it too is not as hard as I imagine it. Cheers Outlaw, your videos genuinely help me
@@mgh7634 GrapheneOS doesn't come with microG, CalyxOS however does come with microG. GrapheneOS doesn't compromise when it comes to privacy or security and microG has a hand in that.
alongside bromite I'd recommend mull, which is a firefox fork. great vid, still hoping for that searx hosting video and also I hope you continue to make upgrade videos on your old thinkpad as I saw in the description of that vid that you said you'd be making upgrades to it. would love to see how that comes about
I have Fdroid because of you soley alone. I also use newpipe (when not viewing your videos because i want my boi to get paid.) Saved me hours from watching adds and i love the download option to watch things off line.
Session is very underrated. It's not perfect yet, some functions are on the roadmap but even the ability to create accounts without sms (or an email address which itself again needs sms for creation) makes it stand out. I compared like every secure messenger and session is on the way to become the best (calls aren't onion rooted and disabled for an example, but your can opt in to it as a beta feature if you really need). But one important note, you say it's a signal fork that's how they started but in order to implement their onion routing they dropped perfect forward secrecy, so saying that it's simply a signal fork can be misleading. But again it has built in onion rooting + you don't need to give any informations to create accounts (a problem with signal and molly) + it's not Android only (a problem with briar) and supports asynchronous chats (a problem with briar).
I'm a Session user but Session has its flaws, automatic messages delete system isn't working good because they keep messages saved on a onion swarm for 14 days.
@@privacyphones3360 never rely on deleting messages in any application, you can't control the device on the other end, you can't control the servers in-between, you must rely on encryption.
@@Cookiekeks that's wrong Session uses its own onion rooting and it's planned to migrate to lokinet that's why I'm saying some functions are still on the roadmap. Lokinet and session both use oxen underneath as far as I understand. The migration to lokinet is said to improve performance also calls will than also be over lokinet instead of p2p.
Duuuuuuuuuuude! You f***in kiddin me! I had no idea! No fuggin clue. This upsets me too cuz its like i have these old phones that i still find purposes for that I realized I could not flash a custom rom too or anything so I just figured I was stuck with google utilities... This is great.
I think so, but it's an automatic process. AFAIK when building the apps they scan/track the source code which anti-features are pulled in though I don't know if a maintainer.
I do my post graduation degree using my old Samsung phone and I do all the presentations and documents using Collabora, WPS or Microsoft Office, so these things could be really useful for some of us 😇
firefox allows browser extensions... and if you use nightly, you can also make your own custom add non collection. that is how i use bypass paywall on my phne
How safe are alternate repositories? i.e., how does one assess whether the software there is reliable, a good idea, or if the repository is reliably hosting what it says it hosts? Is that possible to know without auditing hte code yourself?
F-Droid banned Gab and allows apps that blacklist Gab without labelling that blacklist as an anti-feature. What other anti-features is F-Droid hiding from users? Also, both you and the F-Droid page is missing the RetroArch F-Droid repo.
Wow your Totally right, din't know they did that, just a quick search for "F-Droid banned Gab" will tell you all you need to know about when F-Droid throw out principle and took a political side. thanks for bring this up.
I don't know much tbh but since sms is inherently insecure I don't know if there's a point in that. If the receiving end has your info in their contacts as well, it really doesn't matter what you hide also.
@@chanpasadopolska I see. Aren't all phones these days encrypted? If you avoid using biometrics, and avoid syncing your contacts with anything outside your phone, I think you're fairly safe.
My only real issue with F-Droid is that it doesn't have the ability to auto update apps, and you have to go through and manually update each app that has an update available. Please, correct me if I am wrong, but I cannot find a way to have it automatically update apps Edit: without rooting the device preferably. I'd rather not brick my phone trying to enable automatic updates to fix a mild annoyance
You can enter the app and it will download the updates. Or if you meant to install them, then yes you will need to press for every app for it to install and check "update", button in the pop-up.
There is fdroid privileged extension that requires root to install and comes preinstalled on calyxos It functions as an autoupdater for fdroid, so it seems to update apps seemlessly just like playstore
Rooting isn't that risky unless you have a device from some sketchy manufacteurer. Really the only reasons I could see for not rooting yoru device would be if you have a Samsung device and don't want to trigger Knox, or if you have some app you need to use (e.g. for work) that detects if you're rooted and prevents you from loading it.
@@Chr0n0s38 my information is likely out of date (~5 years), but from what I have heard, you do risk bricking your device by rooting it. I have also been told that some apps like banking apps will refuse to function on rooted devices.
I don't know why but I made a comment talking about a recommendation that you made for an app earlier, and the comment disappeared. It also mentioned a competing app and it's data leak. TH-cam doesn't seem to like to hear about data leaks.
RIP F-Droid is blocked on me or maybe on my country, using VPN works but as you know it slows down the download bandwith which kinda annoying sometimes
Hear me out 🙏 Imagine if Briar added a feature that allows you to use devices the way apple airtag uses to send the messages through other devices via long range low power bluetooth. That would mean unlimited decentralized offgrid p2p messaging without internet from anywhere around the world
I have (almost?) all of them on my F-Droid Classic client, the client never crashes from the massive amount of enabled repositories because my phone is pretty modern
I usually just get an apk from the author's github for example since F-Droid is slow af (it literally takes 2 minutes to search and around 15 minutes before icons start appearing)
Hey I have a stupid question that I haven't able to resolved yet, and that is how to scan a qrcode on a website with my android phone without downloading a third-party app or Google lens?
Ah yes my favorite place F-droid I acctually use this with my seprate users on my graphene install im testing and its always nice. Theres also a open source dating app for all the coomers
so as someone with a Pixel 6 Pro, is it something I should go for? I like the hardware of the Pixel but am not a fan of privacy concerns going with Google.
Your main problem in that regard is the OS ROM you're running unless you never logged into Google on that device. Install a custom ROM first and then bother about your apps. The good thing with the Pixel phones AFAIK is that you won't loose camera quality due to DRM crap since you can still install Gcam when running a custom ROM. As custom ROM look for LineageOS or one specialized for Pixels which is either GrapheneOS or CalyxOS (I'm not sure which of the two).
Is there a parcel / package tracker available? I'm having to use aftership which I've extracted the APK from my spare pixel phone which I use to extract the needed APK files
can you do a vid on moving to android from ios? i just got a one plus this past week after using an iphone for the past decade and i'm kind of lost with the thing
Love how f-droid offers FOSS apps that are way BETTER then most google play store apps
It's downright beautiful and full of utility goodness. Seriously f-droid > google play.
Like all apps on the Play Store have a bunch of shitty ads.
This is bc google makes money from apps with ads and tries to make them seem better than foss apps
Imo where f-droid suffers is in the lack of apps. As in, there are not that many of them which in my case at least leads to there not being equivalents for some more more niche and specialized apps, and generally there being less diversity of apps. Of course this is to be expected as f-droid is less known than google play, and also offers no monetary incentive, but still I feel like that is an issue and as such I hope that more developers create FOSS apps and share them on f-droid.
As for apps that I actually use from there, they of course are high quality. The fact that there's no ads by itself makes them better than 99% of playstore trash
their repos are sluggish and buggy from the app. works well from the web though.
Fdroid is incredible, I hated having to download file managers that show ads every ten screens
Same here. Which one do you use now?
Total Commander, it's good
@@alanbrownjohn4854 my go to is material files, it has smb and sftp built in, been loving it so far
Will check those out, i personally like using amaze file explorer. it has a feature i like ..the 2 window tab
@@alanbrownjohn4854 I used Amaze, too but switched to Material files. Idk about the two tabs function - I've never needed it but I just saw that Material files can open a second window.
I was quite concerned about software security and privacy for years, but never knew where to start. Your channel helped me immensely in that regard. Thank you.
Have you already installed Calyx os or graphene?
@@muramasa870 Definitely get GrapheneOS if possible, Calyx is a mess
@Muramasa Only for Pixel Users!
@@AkashMaurya-gv7sg good. Most other phones have joke security.
@@trollerjakthetrollinggod-e7761 Yeah! what to do?
i hate when my Bible spies on me
Right? Only god can spy on me dammit
I love binge searching apps in fdroid,they amaze me being alternative open source versions of proprietary software,sometimes even better
I recently discovered F-Droid and I love it. I wish I knew about this forever ago as you can get apps that function, don't have ads, and respect your privacy as a bonus. When I reflash my phone's OS this weekend I'm going to definitely rely on F-Droid more.
Got some roms to recommend? I have an old Galaxy A10 lying around and I don't want it to collect dust when it's still got some years left.
@@anobody4606 ROMs available vary from phone to phone. I'm currently on a port of ProtonAOSP for my Oneplus 6T and I like it. I've heard Pixel Experience and LineageOS are good too. LineageOS is most likely going to be the easiest one to install and is most likely to be available for most devices.
I've been using f-droid forever and have never even noticed that this was possible! Thank you so much for this video.
Would recommend Droid-ify as an f-droid client, just for the syncing performance, it also comes with a list of repos, including the ones listed on this video, for you to enable if you want
edit: typos
theres also aurora oss.
Bro thanks, first time to know about this
@@imgladnotu9527 aurora store? The front end for google play store that defaults to anonymous downloads? Also fantastic front end
I use foxy droid and it's hella clean! I switched to cloudflare fdroid repo for faster syncing and downloads
@@solstxce8596 droid-ify is built on foxy droid, not sure what's the difference I literally just installed droid-ify
Activity watch is also on Desktop and has many features.
I use it to track what programs I have open and even what projects im working in down to the time spent in each script.
Great to show as proof for school that in fact, I did just spend 140hrs instead of the 60 required.
@our hero reported for spam.
F-Droid is goated and underrated. Been using it for awhile now. Glad you're covering it Mental Outlaw!
Thanks to your earlier videos on f-droid and smartphone privacy (I think it was the 'get fit for free' one where you talked about f-droid apps for fitness), I learned of it and finally decided to try it out. I'm no tech guy, and I imagined that tinkering with third-party apps, sideloading etc would not only be difficult for me but also pose a security vulnerability, but from own experience I am glad to have been proven wrong. I will definitely try and make my new phone more privacy-oriented in the future, I will see about installing custom OS like graphene next. Perhaps it too is not as hard as I imagine it.
Cheers Outlaw, your videos genuinely help me
I returned to this video 3 times already to scan all those QR codes. Great thing you took the time to display them!
Degoogled ROM with microG+F-Droid+Aurora store(for bloat) masterrace.
Graphine bros represent
@@mgh7634 GrapheneOS doesn't come with microG, CalyxOS however does come with microG. GrapheneOS doesn't compromise when it comes to privacy or security and microG has a hand in that.
If you don't need microG you're better off without it.
alongside bromite I'd recommend mull, which is a firefox fork. great vid, still hoping for that searx hosting video and also I hope you continue to make upgrade videos on your old thinkpad as I saw in the description of that vid that you said you'd be making upgrades to it. would love to see how that comes about
I saw mull and was interested in it. But wasn't sure if it was trying to be "mullvad" i don't believe mullvad has made an android browser yet.
I have Fdroid because of you soley alone. I also use newpipe (when not viewing your videos because i want my boi to get paid.) Saved me hours from watching adds and i love the download option to watch things off line.
I need F droid for my tablet.. the one piece of open source tech I have. Thanks for the video man
Thanks, I needed this. Didn't even know you can add repos like that
Session is very underrated. It's not perfect yet, some functions are on the roadmap but even the ability to create accounts without sms (or an email address which itself again needs sms for creation) makes it stand out. I compared like every secure messenger and session is on the way to become the best (calls aren't onion rooted and disabled for an example, but your can opt in to it as a beta feature if you really need). But one important note, you say it's a signal fork that's how they started but in order to implement their onion routing they dropped perfect forward secrecy, so saying that it's simply a signal fork can be misleading. But again it has built in onion rooting + you don't need to give any informations to create accounts (a problem with signal and molly) + it's not Android only (a problem with briar) and supports asynchronous chats (a problem with briar).
I'm a Session user but Session has its flaws, automatic messages delete system isn't working good because they keep messages saved on a onion swarm for 14 days.
Session is rather bloated and it won't work on older computers
Just a side note, onion routing does not mean TOR in this case. They use their own Onion routing network called Lokinet
@@privacyphones3360 never rely on deleting messages in any application, you can't control the device on the other end, you can't control the servers in-between, you must rely on encryption.
@@Cookiekeks that's wrong Session uses its own onion rooting and it's planned to migrate to lokinet that's why I'm saying some functions are still on the roadmap. Lokinet and session both use oxen underneath as far as I understand. The migration to lokinet is said to improve performance also calls will than also be over lokinet instead of p2p.
Duuuuuuuuuuude! You f***in kiddin me! I had no idea! No fuggin clue. This upsets me too cuz its like i have these old phones that i still find purposes for that I realized I could not flash a custom rom too or anything so I just figured I was stuck with google utilities... This is great.
If you get Aurora Droid it lets you easily select most of these repos.
bro u never disappoint me with your contents
Firefox and Tor browser on Android support add-ons
And Fennec, which is a cleaned up built of Firefox.
I love how this was released just after I installed lineageos onto my old android tablet
Thank you for telling us about those fantastic applications 😃
Hey man, thank's for mentioning collabora office, it looks promising.
I would have never found it on my own 👍
7:00 firefox on mobile supports extensions
It has like, what, 10 extensions? Lol
Kiwi Browser in comparison has access to the entire Chrome Web Store library.
Android user for 15 years, didn't know this existed. Thanks
coincidentally i was JUST yesterday looking for f-droid repos, lol
I assume mentioned anti-features in third-party repos are at the trust of the maintainers?
I think so, but it's an automatic process. AFAIK when building the apps they scan/track the source code which anti-features are pulled in though I don't know if a maintainer.
Thank you so much for this! I'm still a noob when it comes to this stuff.
nice, been loving the many apps on F-droid i'll pass this video around!
I appreciate the more frequent uploads
Is tax season to blame?
Newpipe is awesome.
Thank you for posting this.
I do my post graduation degree using my old Samsung phone and I do all the presentations and documents using Collabora, WPS or Microsoft Office, so these things could be really useful for some of us 😇
Firefox also has extensions
Firefox on android also supports extensions!
Firefox for Android supports extensions like uBlock Origin etc.
Firefox does allow you to install addons; the list is not yet as big as on the desktop though.
Another great video 😃
Used Fdroid a long time replaced some Google apps with Foss. I will always search a Foss option before G play.
Thanks for the repos! Looks very neat!
I had to edit an Excel timesheet using my phone last year, incredibly difficult to do. Hopefully things improve down the road.
Use a wireless keyboard
Fantastic video! You are basically a God. By the way, do you run Gentoo?
What do you think of Obtanium? Side of burritos says its the way? Keep up the great work
Talking about FOSS, have you considered setting up a PeerTube mirror for your videos?
Hmm, nice, I'm always looking to add more repos to fdroid
fdroid is great and i like using fennec as my browser too
#Fdroid fan for life❤
Once again, commenting here so Kenny can do a video of the DivestOS custom ROM for the Oneplus 7 Pro.
For some odd reason f-droid on my android won't let me install apps on there. I have to go to official website to install different apps.
firefox allows browser extensions... and if you use nightly, you can also make your own custom add non collection. that is how i use bypass paywall on my phne
What kind of paywall is that?
Thanks MO, really helpful.
How safe are alternate repositories? i.e., how does one assess whether the software there is reliable, a good idea, or if the repository is reliably hosting what it says it hosts? Is that possible to know without auditing hte code yourself?
Should be good. Many people who use these apps also know how to code and often check the code for vulnerabilities.
F-Droid for the win, thanks for sharing!
F-Droid banned Gab and allows apps that blacklist Gab without labelling that blacklist as an anti-feature. What other anti-features is F-Droid hiding from users?
Also, both you and the F-Droid page is missing the RetroArch F-Droid repo.
Wow your Totally right, din't know they did that, just a quick search for "F-Droid banned Gab" will tell you all you need to know about when F-Droid throw out principle and took a political side. thanks for bring this up.
Aurora Droid is dope as well & adds a bunch of other repositories
Apart from the beautiful UI, it's buggy and unmaintained.
please make a video on best open source pdf viewer
MJ PDF is one I use
Marcel netgaurd and Fairmail creator said he didn't trust f-droid anymore since they left a vulnerability or something a year or 2 ago, fyi
Do you have any idea how to create encrypted phonebook with integrated sms and dialing to prevent 3rd person to check my data on phisical phone?
Just get rid of your girlfriend/wife.
I don't know much tbh but since sms is inherently insecure I don't know if there's a point in that. If the receiving end has your info in their contacts as well, it really doesn't matter what you hide also.
@@dorupero i don't care at this point on external safety, only internal - when someone take my phone to his hands and check my data.
@@chanpasadopolska I see. Aren't all phones these days encrypted? If you avoid using biometrics, and avoid syncing your contacts with anything outside your phone, I think you're fairly safe.
There are integrated vanilla Android features(i think?) that lets you lock apps and if you don't you can install some of those apps.
damn Audio Source is good. my phone has a decent mic, i definitely will use it. thx.
This channel is great 👍
My only real issue with F-Droid is that it doesn't have the ability to auto update apps, and you have to go through and manually update each app that has an update available. Please, correct me if I am wrong, but I cannot find a way to have it automatically update apps
Edit: without rooting the device preferably. I'd rather not brick my phone trying to enable automatic updates to fix a mild annoyance
You can enter the app and it will download the updates.
Or if you meant to install them, then yes you will need to press for every app for it to install and check "update", button in the pop-up.
There is fdroid privileged extension that requires root to install and comes preinstalled on calyxos It functions as an autoupdater for fdroid, so it seems to update apps seemlessly just like playstore
Droid-ify which already contains all of the repo's listed here you just enable them, it lets you know when an app has an update
Rooting isn't that risky unless you have a device from some sketchy manufacteurer. Really the only reasons I could see for not rooting yoru device would be if you have a Samsung device and don't want to trigger Knox, or if you have some app you need to use (e.g. for work) that detects if you're rooted and prevents you from loading it.
@@Chr0n0s38 my information is likely out of date (~5 years), but from what I have heard, you do risk bricking your device by rooting it. I have also been told that some apps like banking apps will refuse to function on rooted devices.
I have to admit I have been Linux user for 5 years and never knew about fdroid
What is your opinion on mobile wide tracking blockers like Blokada?
I don't know why but I made a comment talking about a recommendation that you made for an app earlier, and the comment disappeared. It also mentioned a competing app and it's data leak.
TH-cam doesn't seem to like to hear about data leaks.
I love Collabora Office, it's much better than Google/Microsoft/WPS garbage
I’ve been using F-Droid for years, one of the first things I install whenever I get a new phone. I wish there was an equivalent for iPhone lol. 🤣
Well, unless you jailbreak them, iPhones are way too locked down for that.
Android tablets, and folding devices are also technically "android phones"...
...thus image editors, sheets, and the like can be pretty important
RIP F-Droid is blocked on me or maybe on my country, using VPN works but as you know it slows down the download bandwith which kinda annoying sometimes
Amazing video!
Pretty useful apps. Thanks!
Commenting for the algorithm
What's a good foss call recorder?
Cup and string
I was just looking for repos the other day since I only have DivestOS, Guardian, and a couple other ones (aside from the default repos).
Hey man do you know about nostr?
Session doesn't use the Signal protocol anymore, not sure if it is fair to call it a fork of signal
Hi there. Appreciation from Europe. 👍⚡️🔥. Recommend for anyone who knows exactly where and how….🤐✊
Hi can you make video about yggdrasil it seems to be something interesting
Stupid question here - if you’re just on regular Android, or on iOS, and download Session, I guess that’s less secure?
Hear me out 🙏
Imagine if Briar added a feature that allows you to use devices the way apple airtag uses to send the messages through other devices via long range low power bluetooth.
That would mean unlimited decentralized offgrid p2p messaging without internet from anywhere around the world
I have (almost?) all of them on my F-Droid Classic client, the client never crashes from the massive amount of enabled repositories because my phone is pretty modern
great video thanks.
Do a review of Graphene OS and if it would have been safer than ANOM?
Mental outlaw briar forum when??? Send the link to get people using it more.
I love Bromite it's so much cleaner then brave and it looks like chrome
I usually just get an apk from the author's github for example since F-Droid is slow af (it literally takes 2 minutes to search and around 15 minutes before icons start appearing)
That got way better recently IMO. And also alternative F-Droid clients can work better in that regard.
Hey I have a stupid question that I haven't able to resolved yet, and that is how to scan a qrcode on a website with my android phone without downloading a third-party app or Google lens?
Nice vid, any vids on de-googling ur phone? How that works?
Install lineage os. Search that on yt or whichever search engine you prefer
you can use extensions on just normal android firefox tho
Ah yes my favorite place F-droid
I acctually use this with my seprate users on my graphene install im testing and its always nice.
Theres also a open source dating app for all the coomers
so as someone with a Pixel 6 Pro, is it something I should go for? I like the hardware of the Pixel but am not a fan of privacy concerns going with Google.
Your main problem in that regard is the OS ROM you're running unless you never logged into Google on that device. Install a custom ROM first and then bother about your apps. The good thing with the Pixel phones AFAIK is that you won't loose camera quality due to DRM crap since you can still install Gcam when running a custom ROM.
As custom ROM look for LineageOS or one specialized for Pixels which is either GrapheneOS or CalyxOS (I'm not sure which of the two).
Thank you for doing all this research for me so I can get more gaming in instead of researching :)
I love f droid
Is there a parcel / package tracker available? I'm having to use aftership which I've extracted the APK from my spare pixel phone which I use to extract the needed APK files
Please make a video on important f Droid apps but for tablets
i would also recommnended aurora droid & aurora store.
Only thing I dont like about F-Droid, is that they removed Gab.... Not that I use it, but, goes to show, even they are bending their spine for the PC.
True, although they just control their own repo, not the ones you can add.
can you do a vid on moving to android from ios? i just got a one plus this past week after using an iphone for the past decade and i'm kind of lost with the thing
Kenny do you have a mastadon instance or account