Having used Android phones for the better part of the past decade, I’ve gotten accustomed to several open-source Android apps. I find these better than their closed-source equivalents—in both functionality and user experience—and I can’t imagine using my phone without them.

10

Bitwarden

Bitwarden is an open-source password manager that I use to store login credentials for all my online accounts. The app offers a clean and simple interface that’s easy to navigate and packs all the essential password-management features I need.

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I particularly like its built-in password generator. It gives me complete control over the generated password, allowing me to choose its various characteristics so I can ensure both my and the website’s requirements are satisfied before I use it for an account. You can also generate passphrases in case you prefer them over passwords.

Custom fields are another Bitwarden feature I use extensively. With these, I can store extra info like security questions, so they’re quickly available along with my login credentials.

Aside from passwords, I also use Bitwarden to store personal information such as software license codes and home server details. This is possible thanks to Bitwarden’s Secure Note feature, which keeps all your notes secure in its encrypted vault.

Bitwarden also offers an easy way to share passwords, even with non-Bitwarden users. It’s called Bitwarden Send, and it gives you control over how the other person can interact with your shared passwords.

Download: Bitwarden (Free, subscription available)

9

VLC for Android

VLC is a free and open-source multimedia player available on desktop, as well as Android. It can play a host of audio and video file formats, including MP4, AVI, Ogg, FLAC, MKV, and MOV.

While I use Poweramp for playing local music files, VLC is my go-to player for all video playback needs. This includes playing videos stored locally on my phone, as well as those on other devices like my home server. VLC makes this possible thanks to support for network streaming and network file sharing (SMB, FTP, and DLNA).

The app offers a comprehensive set of controls for both audio and video playback. Outside of the basics, you’ll find features like Audio Boost for files with low audio, picture-in-picture (PiP) mode to play content while multitasking, a built-in 10-band equalizer to tweak the audio, and Bookmark to save specific points within a file to return to quickly.

VLC is also ad-free, which isn’t common for apps in this category.

Download: VLC for Android (Free)

8

BinaryEye

Binary Eye is my go-to app for scanning and generating barcodes and QR codes on my Android phone. It operates on the ZXing barcode scanning library, which is open-source and supports a range of barcode types.

One of the main reasons I use it, aside from it being 100% free with no ads, is that it can read inverted codes. These inverted-color codes are becoming increasingly common to match design and aesthetics. Similarly, I appreciate that it supports scanning in both portrait and landscape orientations.

As soon as you scan a code, Binary Eye shows its content on the screen. (You can skip this for faster access, but I’d advise against it.) Depending on the code, you’ll see action suggestions like Copy, Share, and Open.

Likewise, generating barcodes in Binary Eye is straightforward. You can choose from a range of desired formats, set your preferred background and foreground, and similar. The app will then create an output that’s easy to save or share.

Download: Binary Eye (Free)

Image Toolbox is a powerful app that allows you to perform a range of image and PDF manipulations on your Android phone. At the time of writing, it packs around 50 tools spanning multiple categories.

I use Image Toolbox for all kinds of image operations, from cropping, converting, and resizing to removing backgrounds, stitching, and splitting. In addition, I also use its PDF tools to convert PDFs to images and vice versa, and the EXIF tools for editing or deleting metadata before sharing images online.

The best part about Image Toolbox is that it supports batch processing, so you can perform operations on multiple files at once. That said, be aware that the results with some of the advanced tools may not always be comparable to what you’d get from desktop tools.

Download: Image Toolbox (Free)

6

LocalSend

My work requires me to use several PC and smartphone operating systems. As such, I need an app that allows me to quickly and easily transfer files between all my devices. LocalSend is my current go-to for this.

LocalSend allows peer-to-peer file transfers between devices on the same local network. You can use it to send and receive all kinds of files, including images, videos, documents, and APKs. Plus, you can even share clipboard content or send text messages. If someone doesn’t use LocalSend, you can instead generate a shareable link they can open in a browser to access all the files.

All your transfers in LocalSend are end-to-end encrypted using TLS to ensure complete privacy, and it has no ads to worry about.

Download: LocalSend (Free)

5

Firefox

Since I use multiple devices and operating systems, I need a browser that ensures my browsing data is accessible across all of them. My primary reason for picking Firefox years ago—aside from it being free and open source—is its superior privacy protection features.

For example, Firefox comes with Enhanced Tracking Protection to protect you against cross-site trackers. By default, it’s set to the Standard level, which blocks fewer trackers, but I switch to Strict (for advanced protection) or Custom (for customized blocking) based on the websites I’m visiting.

There’s another nifty privacy feature called HTTPS-Only Mode. As the name implies, this feature prevents the browser from making any connections that aren’t secured with HTTPS.

Firefox on Android has lots of other perks like support for extensions, a built-in PDF viewer, and the ability to use an external download manager.

Download: Firefox (Free)

4

FFShare

FFShare is one of the first apps I always install on a new Android phone. It helps me shrink the size of image, video, or audio files to make them fit for storage or sharing while also removing their metadata.

While many other apps can do this, I prefer FFShare for two reasons. First is the control and flexibility it offers over encoding and decoding: I can choose everything from codec and qscale to resolution and file size.

Second is the fact that it uses FFmpeg, a popular open-source multimedia framework for media processing known for its efficient compression with minimal quality loss. This helps with various media conversion and manipulation needs.

Aside from being efficient and effective, FFShare is also really speedy.

Download: FFShare (Free)

3

Termux

Termux is one of the popular Android terminal emulator apps that gives you access to a Linux environment on your phone. This enables you to run Linux CLI utilities, install packages, automate various tasks, access remote servers, and much more.

My use case for Termux is quite limited, though. I primarily use it to manage my home server (and its content), or to securely access or transfer files between my Android phone and other devices remotely.

I like Termux best because it’s super easy to use, fast, and doesn’t consume excessive battery. And for times when I need additional tools, I can easily install them into Termux to extend its functionality.

Download: Termux (Free)

2

F-Droid

F-Droid is an open-source app store, serving as one of the many alternatives to Google’s Play Store, with a huge library of open-source apps that are open for anyone to inspect and modify.

You don’t need an account to browse and download apps on F-Droid, unlike the Play Store. Since it’s committed to transparency and privacy, it flags undesirable aspects of apps such as advertisements, trackers, non-free assets, and non-free service promotions.

While you’ll find many apps from the Play Store on F-Droid, some of the popular F-Droid exclusives include Syncthing-Fork (secure file synchronization service), Aegis Authenticator (2FA app), Seal (audio/video downloader), Amaze (file manager), and Key Mapper (hardware button remapper).

F-Droid is based on a repository system. This means you can add multiple repositories to the app to explore, find, and download the apps they host.

Download: F-Droid (Free)

1

Obtainium

Obtainium allows you to easily install and update apps from their official release pages and sends you notifications when new releases are available. That way, I don’t have to head into the repositories of different apps and install them manually.

As of the time of writing, Obtainium supports over 15 app sources. Some of the popular names include GitHub, GitLab, Aptoide, APKPure, and F-Droid. I’ve installed a few Android apps on my phone from these alternative sources, and this lets me update them all in one place.

It’s important to note that Obtainium relies on web scraping for some sources. As a result, if the websites undergo any major design or structure changes, the app will fail to obtain the latest releases.

Download: Obtainium (Free)

If you haven’t explored the world of open-source Android apps, now is a great time to do so. The apps above can serve as a great starting point, but there are countless other useful open-source apps available if you’re interested in this world.

You’ll discover them as you delve deeper into the ecosystem. You can also look up open-source alternatives for apps you’re currently using—but not satisfied with—and see how they compare.