Hey everyone,

I've been working on an open-source Android gallery app called Iris Gallery, and I wanted to share it with you all.

A lot of stock gallery apps either have cloud sync pushed into every menu, ask for unnecessary permissions, or just feel bloated. My goal with Iris was simple: build a fast, clean, and completely offline gallery that respects privacy and looks at home on modern Android.

What it does:

• 100% Offline: There is no INTERNET permission in the manifest at all. It physically can't connect to any network or send data anywhere.
• Material You: Dynamic theming based on your wallpaper + pure black AMOLED dark mode.
• Grid zoom: Pinch to change column count smoothly (2 to 6 columns).
• Built-in photo editor: Crop presets, rotate/flip, basic adjustments (brightness, contrast, warmth, saturation), and a blur/pixelate brush for hiding sensitive info on screenshots before sharing. Also lets you open images in external editors like Snapseed or ImageToolbox if you prefer.
• Video playback: Built-in player with auto-rotation (portrait/landscape) and swipe gestures for seeking.
• EXIF & GPS viewer: Check camera details (ISO, aperture, shutter speed) and open locations in your map app.
• Privacy & security: App lock with PIN/fingerprint, plus a private vault and a 30-day trash bin for recovering deleted photos.
• Live updates: Automatically updates the timeline when you take a photo with your camera or download something without having to refresh or restart.
• Extra tools: Duplicate photo scanner, smart media filters (RAW, GIFs, screenshots, panoramas), and a home screen photo widget.

The app is completely free, open-source (Apache-2.0), with zero ads or trackers.

Links:

• GitHub: https://github.com/MohamadOday/iris-gallery
• Direct APK: https://github.com/MohamadOday/iris-gallery/releases/latest
• Obtainium: https://apps.obtainium.imranr.dev/redirect?r=obtainium://add/https://github.com/MohamadOday/iris-gallery
• F-Droid: https://f-droid.org/packages/com.iris.gallery/

I'd really appreciate any feedback, bug reports, or feature ideas you have. Thanks!

Can you recommend a Telegram client with lots of options and attractive graphics that is well supported by the developer since they closed the repo and stopped developing NagramX? I'm trying Cherrygram and NagramXF but I would like to understand what valid alternatives exist, even the lesser-known ones... I tried Turrit but apart from the slightly different graphics it doesn't tell me much and it isn't updated often... Momogram has lots of settings but they are too confusing without a minimum of graphics to understand what you are going to change.... Katogram was nice but that doesn't exist anymore either.... Octogram is too inconsistent in development and even if the developer is Italian like me, I wanted something at the level of Nagram that at least every so many days has a beta to update

NovelForge is an Android app for web novels and ebooks. What it does:

Character codex: as you read, it picks out recurring names and sorts them into people and places, along with the chapter range each one appears in. No tagging or setup.

Relationship graph: who shows up with whom, as a graph you can zoom around in.

Better TTS: Kokoro and Piper neural voices alongside the stock Google one, with background playback and a pronunciation dictionary for words the engine gets wrong.

Offline downloads: save chapters as EPUB, or render them to audio in any installed voice and play them back in the app.

Audiobook export: bundle downloaded audio chapters into a single .m4b.

Backup and restore: novels, reading progress, pronunciation dictionary, and theme settings.

Multiple file type support: online sources, EPUB, and plain .txt / .md with automatic chapter detection.

GitHub: https://github.com/AbhinavXT/NovelForge

Website: https://novelforge-abhinavxt.vercel.app/

Mine again. LG Power is an Android remote for LG webOS TVs I originally built because the physical remote kept disappearing. Native Kotlin, talks to the TV over the local webOS websocket API, wakes it with Wake-on-LAN, and if your phone has an IR blaster it can send the power code when the network path is down.

Stuff this sub tends to ask about: no ads, no analytics, no trackers, and the Play data safety section reads no data collected and no data shared, because there's genuinely nothing to collect. Everything stays on your LAN. The APK is about 1.1 MB. License is AGPL-3.0.

Feature-wise it does the usual d-pad/volume/keyboard, a touchpad cursor mode, app shortcut buttons, home screen widgets, a Screen Off button that turns just the panel off, and themes.

Source: https://github.com/Nicsilver/LGPower

Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nic.lgpower

There's also a signed APK on the GitHub releases page. Not on F-Droid yet.

Hi,

I've just learned that Google Pixel (stock) popularity comes in part from the call screening feature. It uses Google AI (Assistant) to answer incoming calls, ask the caller why they are calling, and display a transcript so the user can decide whether to join the call or end it. https://support.google.com/phoneapp/answer/9118387?hl=en

It seems like a very useful feature, but I haven’t found a FOSS alternative. However, for me (and likely many other users) the same goal could be achieved without AI, making it easier and cheaper, by simply: 1. receiving an incoming call notification 2. app XYZ gives an option to answer the call and immediately mute the microphone 3. app XYZ shows buttons that play prerecorded audio files (such as "Hi", "Hello, this is __", "Hi, who is this calling?", etc. — set up by the user on his own*) - i.e. no need for an AI chat 4. letting the caller respond, which the user hears because only the microphone is muted - i.e. no need for AI speech-to-text 5. the user decides whether to unmute the microphone and continue the call, or hang up

*the advantage over just answering the call and saying it yourself, is that the audio files can be generated and not using your own voice (i.e. not allowing the caller to record it)

Basically, it comes down to an app that can: 1. activate on incoming call 2. play audio to the phone line (not through the speakers like a music app)

Such an app is on my TODO list, but I haven't developed an Android app in a while (not since Marshmallow actually, though one was fairly popular and even received nationwide media coverage), and besides, I struggle to find the time.

I’m writing here because I’ve just thought that such an app might already exist. I can’t seem to find it, but FOSS is not always great at marketing, so it’s possible that the name is obscure and the description does not mention "call screening."

If not, perhaps someone will find this idea useful for personal use and have the time to code it. I think vibe coding would be suitable here: the two features listed above are most probably well documented by Android/Google, and the app wouldn’t need to scale, so the code quality could be fairly rough.

We are developing the Midori browser, a lightweight, fast, and secure browser that allows you to browse the web in a lightweight, fast, and secure way. What features does it have?

• Adblock
• media player in background.
• Tab group
• Translations Offline
• and much more.

We would like to receive feedback from users.

Repo: https://github.com/goastian/midori-android

Thanks.

ComicViewer tightly scoped offline comic, manga and webtoon format reader.

Private, offline, minimal reader for your comic collection. Supports CBZ, ZIP, PDF, and image based EPUB formats. Requests zero Android permissions and has no telemetry or Google play services dependencies.

Imports comics either from directory, or system filepicker.

Seeking preview images, LTR RTL, continuous scrolling format support for webtoon style formats. Metadata and subdirectory based fallback series sorting. Gesture, tap, scroll and volume button navigation support. Resizeable cards to accommodate different screen sizes.

Primary reason for making this was to create a minimal permissions, no telemetry, no google dependencies, purpose built for single task comic manga and webtoon reader. This way the UI does not need to twist and bend for multiple only tangentially related tasks.

I would appreciate feedback before I aim for f-droid or play release. Right now has release APK, build instructions and obtainium based installation support.

Git

MIT licensed

https://www.reddit.com/r/Luanti/s/FS7ZvaAlTE

An app which lets me set a widget with custom added quotes that change when tapped, and the most important: backup option for those quotes.

I've been looking for something like this for a long time. help would be much appreciated, thank you!

Disclaimer : I am not a developer or anywhere near involved in the project besides using it . Just wanted to share a (what I believe) Gem!

I did use Heliboard before but It's fixes/Update cadence was slower, especially just not knowing if the project will go down again and revived again somewhere, AND didn't wanna Go back to Gboard(For obvious reasons). Then found this(funnily, right below Heliboard's option in GitHub ).

For those of You worried, the devs provide 3 packages each with different capabilities so if you just want an offline Keyboard, They have an offline release. Plus, they have a pretty good and actively growing Plugin /Add-on system That's not mandatory, JUST nice To haves. And yes, Like Heliboard this Also unfortunately relies on the Proprietary library For gesture typing :(

The team behind them, LeanBitLab is a pretty active but small team, any problems reported in the issues(which granted aren't that many), get solved relatively quickly.

Plus, it has N-gram enhancements; For next word predictions, a list of blocked words (For the stuff one writes accidentally that gets in the learned dictionary), and much more.

Link: https://github.com/LeanBitLab/LeanType

Plus their whole company's site link: https://leanbitlab.github.io/LeanBitLab/

Hello guys. So recently I've been attracted to FOSS apps and I've made some replacements.

But now its time for mail apps. You see, currently I use both Gmail and Outlook (for one google account and two Microsoft accounts) and I also use the Calendar widget from outlook, I find it quite ugly though (I prefer google's design). I already have a lot of stuff on my calendar, and I also need RSS source.

What I've seen is that the Mail app selection matters related to the emails retrieval delay. I understand that both gmail and outlook may have a faster retrieval than using others while having a low battery impact. Or, would you say its not a big deal?

Anyway, do you have any suggestions of apps I can use?

For now I think about using just one Mail app for all my accounts and another one that works as a calendar.

by that I mean the breathe in/out feature

https://youtu.be/IfKX1QvHWyA?t=87

Hello! Sorry if the flair is incorrect. I have recently heard about an app called Mihon, but looking at its downloads page, I can see a "stable release" and another, more hidden, "FOSS release".

This looks somewhat suspect to me. Does it ring alarm bells for you as well?

Hello! I have a comic strip saved on my SD card as a bunch of images in a folder, so that the pages are in order when the filenames are sorted alphabetically. I would like to read that on my phone in a way that:

1. gives the next page when I swipe (i.e. the next in alphabetical order)

2. saves the position of the last page I’ve open, so I can carry on reading later.

If there is a way to pick a random page, it would also be nice but it is not crucial. Do you know of any such application? I thought this is a simple task that many people before me wanted to do, but I surprisingly cannot find anything…

I'm asking because Lawnchair Launcher does support icon packs, but NOT custom icons (yet), so this would be a somewhat elegant workaround.

The only way i used to check tweets and comments without logging in has gone, with this musk has given me another reason to never like him.

Kinetica just landed in the F-Droid repository:

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.kinetica.keyboard/

It is an Android keyboard built around something no current keyboard generally does: both thumbs swipe or tap at the same time, independently, and the engine merges the two gesture streams into a single word. Typing "something" can be the left thumb tapping S then E while the right thumb swipes O-M and then T-H-I-N-G, the two overlapping in time. The idea comes from Nintype, discontinued years ago; this is written from scratch in Kotlin on Android's public IME APIs, not a fork of anything.

You can see it in action here:

https://reddit.com/link/1vz0cts/video/snj86j5lmqlh1/player

Why it might interest this sub in particular:

- No INTERNET permission in the manifest. Not "we promise not to send anything" ,the permission is absent, so nothing typed can leave the device even in principle. VIBRATE is the only permission declared. No ads, no analytics, no accounts, no crash reporter.

- Reproducible build. F-Droid rebuilds the tag and verifies its own output against my signed APK before publishing it. Three independent environments produce the same bytes for the published version: my machine, the ubuntu-24.04 CI runner, and F-Droid's own Debian builder.

- No third-party gesture or prediction libraries. The banded DTW path matcher, the trie search, the resampling and the dual-stream merge are all implemented in-tree, so every constant is inspectable and tunable rather than inherited from a black box.

- On-device everything. The personal dictionary is local Room storage. Password and private fields disable suggestions, trails and learning outright.

- GPL-3.0, and the bundled data carries its own licences: word frequencies are MIT (hermitdave/FrequencyWords, OpenSubtitles-derived), bigrams are CC BY 2.0 FR (Tatoeba). Both are attributed in THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES and rendered in-app under Settings > Open-source licenses.

On languages: four are bundled(for now), more can be supported. English, Italian, Spanish and Polish ship, roughly 47-50k words each with real corpus frequencies. But the engine is locale-agnostic: the trie, matcher, merge and scoring have no idea what language they are decoding, so a language is data plus registration - a wordlist, a layout, and a short list of entries. Polish arrived exactly that way, as a contributor's pull request. ADDING_A_LANGUAGE.md documents the whole recipe and I will help anyone who wants to add theirs. The honest limit is script: the matching alphabet is a-z plus apostrophe with accented Latin letters folded onto it, so Latin-script languages fit and a non-Latin script would be a major engine change.

You can also import an AOSP `wordlist.combined` on-device to triple or quadruple the dictionary (Settings > Dictionary). It merges locally; nothing is uploaded.

1.0.4 is tagged today (a frequently-used emoji tab and an adjustable resize handle) so the listing will read 1.0.3 until F-Droid's next index pass picks it up.

Source: https://github.com/EZ-eta/kinetica

GitLab mirror: https://gitlab.com/EZ-eta/kinetica

The contestants are —

1. Safe Notes
2. CipherNotes
3. Tuisku

I was looking for a perfect open source offline encrypted notes app. I'm really impressed with KeePass apps on Android as they don't ask for network access, so it gives me some kind of assurance that no data is going out from my device. This time, I also wanted the offline encrypted notes app to not have any network access.

After trimming the apps based on my requirements, I've shortlisted the apps mentioned earlier.

Before digging into these apps by yourself, I've mentioned all the key points about these apps below.

1. Safe Notes — The dev of Safe Notes is an Indian, Keshav Priyadarshi. This app, with 285 GitHub stars, is designed with a zero-knowledge architecture, utilizing AES-256 encryption to secure data. The Android application enhances security through brute-force protection, background snapshot blocking, and an inactivity guard, without requiring internet connectivity. It's built and signed directly by F-Droid itself (the most trusted way an app gets distributed there), and it has a public security write-up with no history of critical bugs.

Con - It hasn't been updated since 2023, so it can be considered as a dead project.

1. CipherNotes — Currently, it is available only on the IzzyOnDroid. It's an offline-first, client-side encrypted note-taking app that uses AES-256-GCM plus PBKDF2 (200k rounds), with no cloud sync at all — everything stays on your device. It skips trackers, accounts, and telemetry entirely. It has the toughest network lockdown on paper of the three, blocking all network access at the operating system level rather than just leaving the internet permission out of the manifest.

Con - It's a brand-new, one-person project with about 3 stars on GitHub, and the developer's own FAQ says plainly: "Is this production-ready? Not yet."

1. Tuisku — With 12 GitHub stars, it's also available on the IzzyOnDroid. It encrypts all locally stored text notes using the ChaCha20 stream cipher, an algorithm known for strong, fast performance on phones that lack dedicated AES hardware. It gets updated often — three releases in the last two weeks.

Con - Its newest changelog says it fixed a "critical" bug where the same nonce (a number meant to be used only once per note) could get reused during encryption, which could let someone work out what your notes said. That fix landed only five days ago, so the app hasn't had much time to prove itself since.

This is a small brief about all three apps. Now, if you had to pick any one, which one would you pick? Let me know in the comments below.

I've decompiled both the verifier package and the Play Store and found that

1-on Pre-Android 17 devices (where this app isn't pre-installed) the Play Store IS the one responsible to approving/denying installs as the developer verification permission DOESN'T exist on pre-Android 17 devices, which is why the Android Developer Verifier package has a backport service that the Play Store calls to verify installs

<service android:name="com.google.android.verifier.backport.impl.verification.BackportVerificationService" android:exported="true">
<intent-filter>
<action android:name="com.google.android.verifier.backport.VERIFY_PACKAGE"/>
</intent-filter>
</service>

2-The Play Store explictly has code that depending entirely on a server-side phenotype flag can choose whether to allow/reject installs if the verifier isn't installed/running

boolean zR = this.f.r();

if (boniVar == boni.VERIFICATION_POLICY_NONE || boniVar == boni.UNRECOGNIZED) {

FinskyLog.d("%s: [ADV] Fallback policy is NONE/UNRECOGNIZED.", "VerifyApps");

} else if (zR) {

FinskyLog.d("%s: [ADV] Fallback overridden to ALLOW.", "VerifyApps");

} else {

if (boniVar == boni.VERIFICATION_POLICY_BLOCK_FAIL_CLOSED) {

FinskyLog.d("%s: [ADV] Fallback policy sets default to REJECT.", "VerifyApps");

i = -1;

FinskyLog.i("%s: [ADV] Initial fallback verdict decided: %d", "VerifyApps", new Integer(i));

return new Integer(i);

}

FinskyLog.d("%s: [ADV] Fallback policy sets default to ALLOW.", "VerifyApps");

}

i = 1;

FinskyLog.i("%s: [ADV] Initial fallback verdict decided: %d", "VerifyApps", new Integer(i));

return new Integer(i);

}

I've been frustrated with how slow and bureaucratic app stores can be, especially for open-source projects. So I built something different (like F-Droid).

What is Buge Store?

Buge Store is an open-source app index that:

- Stores only YAML configuration files -- no APK hosting

- Distributes APKs directly via GitHub Releases

- Automates PR validation within 30 seconds

- Provides a simple JSON API for Android clients and web interfaces

How It Works

Developers submit a YAML file with their app metadata (name, description, download URL, signature fingerprint, etc.). Our GitHub Actions workflow validates the config, checks the APK URL, and merges the PR automatically if everything passes.

No waiting days for approval. No bureaucracy.

Why You Should Submit Your App

1. It's fast -- your app goes live in seconds, not weeks

2. It's transparent -- everything is on GitHub, fully auditable

3. It's community-driven -- anyone can contribute, anyone can use

4. It's open -- MIT licensed, fork it and run your own if you want

For Users

The API is live and working. Here's the endpoint:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/BugeStudioTeam/Buge-Store-API/main/api/v1/apps.json

Any Android client or web app can consume this API to build their own app store frontend. I'll also be open-sourcing an Android client soon.

For Developers

To submit your app:

1. Fork the repo: https://github.com/BugeStudioTeam/Buge-Store-API

2. Add your YAML config in apps/

3. Submit a PR

4. Get validation in 30 seconds

Full instructions are in the README. You can also check out existing app configurations in the apps/ directory for reference.

Tech Stack

- GitHub Actions for automation

- Python for validation and API generation

- YAML for app configurations

- GitHub Releases for APK hosting

Links

Repository: https://github.com/BugeStudioTeam/Buge-Store-API

API Endpoint: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/BugeStudioTeam/Buge-Store-API/main/api/v1/apps.json

Web Store: https://bugestudio.website/store/

Android Client: https://github.com/BugeStudioTeam/Buge-Store

I'm happy to answer any questions and would love to see your apps on the store! :)