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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!

Here's a blog post where I talk about some well-known open-source games: libranet.de/display/0b6b25a8-7…

I was originally going to post it directly to this group, but for some reason whenever I tried it the message got stuck "pending" and removing the mention fixed it.

@opensource Yesterday, I received a PINE64 PineTime smart watch as a late Christmas gift. I had asked for it mostly out of curiosity, and because considering that it was fairly cheap at around $35, if I fall out of using it, it's nowhere near as much of a loss as buying a laptop I never use. I've never used a smart watch before, except for a FitBit and GameBand very briefly, so I can't compare the PineTime to other smart watches easily. I probably would have gone on without a smartwatch, too, were it not for the selling point of it being hackable, open hardware at a low price.

Overall, it seems to be a perfectly fine watch. The build quality is good; it feels durable, and the wristband isn't the most comfortable thing out there but it does the job. The default OS was InfiniTime 1.6, which I soon upgraded to InfiniTime 1.11. It's not Linux, as Linux couldn't run on the cheap hardware used in the PineTime (64KB RAM). Rather, it is a derivative of FreeRTOS, with a custom UI made specifically for the PineTime, and by far the most actively developed of all OSes for it. InfiniTime is a pretty good OS, usable enough, but without installable apps or a proper text input method, it's no watchOS replacement. The alternative OS, Wasp-os, seems to support installing apps specifically written for it, but I have yet to try it.

On first boot the watch seemed stuck at the Unix epoch and there seemed no way to set the time. I had to pair it with my phone, so I installed Gadgetbridge, one of the recommended companion apps, from F-Droid. It asked for tons of permissions including restricted ones, and I had to unpair the device in the normal settings to pair it again via Gadgetbridge - annoying, but eventually I got the time to sync up with my phone. With that out of the way I could look around and see how everything worked, and it didn't take long to get used to the OS. I checked the InfiniTime GitHub for updates, and installed the latest version to get, among other things, an AWESOME terminal-style watch face. I also found some documentation, albeit woefully incomplete and scattered, of the update process and some features I'd not been able to find myself.

Among the features: notification sync with the phone (no text input though), step tracking, heart monitor, accelerometer, metronome, drawing pad, music controls, navigation, one alarm, a stopwatch, and clones of Pong and 2048. Pong and 2048 are nice distractions that are probably a bit healthier than playing similar games on my phone while walking, but the novelty wore off very quickly. Pong in particular feels like a game developers put on obscure hardware just to prove they can. The drawing pad is not very usable, and I'd honestly rather have something like a calculator in its place.

I was charging PineTime for most of the first night I had it, and I was initially concerned that the battery drained by almost 15 percentage points when I removed it from the charging base for 15 minutes, but when I got to spend a full day with it, it only dropped from 84% to 67% over the course of a day without charging - quite reasonable. It just discharged at a very inconsistent rate.

Overall, besides using free software, the PineTime is a good enough watch that fills a solid niche in between something high-end like the Apple Watch, and a cheap digital watch with a couple games on it. I would recommend it to someone in need of that and I could see myself carrying this on my wrist for a good while. However, the default OS is poorly documented and the apps aren't fully featured yet, so expect some small difficulties.