84
votes
What are your go-to mobile apps?
I'm looking for suggestions. The Internet has become very small over the last 11 years. My go-to for the moments of downtime was RIF. I was able to consume all the little spaces with it since it was an infinite feed - that's a bit harder now. All sorts of apps are welcome, but I'm not looking for things that require high effort or attention span (unless they are worth it). Games are fine, but other apps that fill your time are very good - preferably SFW and audio-off! I use Android, so I prefer those, but our Apple brethren are also welcome to share.
Stuff in the social network or online reading mold:
Other apps I particularly like:
And finally, a selection of game recommendations:
I'd recommend looking at FreshRSS over TT-RSS - I made the switch after the TT dev was being really obstinate about some fixes and I've been very glad I did
Oh, interesting. Tiny Tiny RSS has been working well for me ever since Google Reader shut down, but I'll go try out FreshRSS and see if it adds enough to warrant switching over.
(I did note when making this list that the official TT-RSS Android app is no longer on the Google Play store and the version on F-Droid is a slightly-outdated fork of the original. There does seem to be a different, unofficial TT-RSS client on both F-Droid and Google Play, but that app's developer appears to be a bit abrasive, which is often not a good sign.)
Where do you look for feeds?
They tend to come up organically. When I find a website with periodic updates (usually a blog, but sometimes other things) and I want to read (or at least look at) every post, I'll put the base website URL into Tiny Tiny RSS. They'll usually have RSS autodiscovery tags in the HTML, so TT-RSS will automatically extract the RSS feed for me. In some rare cases, the website won't have RSS autodiscovery, but will have an RSS icon somewhere with a link to its feed.
If the website doesn't have its own RSS feed, I'll usually just skip it. (One of the recipe sites I used to follow dropped its RSS feeds and I, with some regret, stopped following them. It helped—I guess—that they'd been bought out and the content was going downhill already, anyway.) There are some services online that purport to generate RSS feeds from websites that don't have their own. I've never gotten good results from any of the ones I've tried, so I don't use any of them.
I'm sure it's fine, but calculators have already peaked.
Seriously though, it may be niche but I think Free42 is a really neat little app.
Free42 does look nice. I wasn't aware of it before, and I do like that it's open source. On the other hand, I never got into RPN calculators and I really like HiPER's expression-oriented inputs. I don't normally do things as complex as this one HiPER example, but I'd much prefer entering it in a way that looks the way I'd write it down, rather than doing the work of decomposing it into individual, appropriately-ordered RPN operations.
Overall, HiPER just looks and feels to me more like a smartphone app with scientific calculator features, as opposed to an attempt to exactly recreate a specific three-decade-old physical calculator.
I did experiment with Wabbitemu a while back and ended up coming to a similar conclusion. I preferred HiPER's smartphone-like approach over Wabbitemu's strict emulation.
Oh, HiPER is going to be better for most people. Free42 is really more of a novelty for everyone who isn't used to HP's RPN calculators. Though coincidentally while I was trying to remember the name of this calculator app, I discovered there is also a simulator for HP's graphing calculator called iHP48, though it only appears to have an iPhone version.
Personally I prefer to have real hardware calculators if I'm going to be working on difficult math. Buttons beat touchscreens every time. And for regular scientific calculators you really can't beat Casio's offerings, which are not only very full-featured but are still really inexpensive. Their graphing calculators aren't bad either, but I don't usually need those features.
Would love one of these for the TI-89. That calc got me through high school and college.
There's a TI-84 simulator for iPhone, but you probably won't get one for the 89 because it's more software-reliant and Apple says no to emulation. TI is also famously litigious when it comes to their calculators.
But who knows, maybe someone'll make their own version of the firmware.
The TI-89 titanium was my first graphing calculator so I have a lot of good memories of it, but modern Casio models are so much better, even if it were only for the much higher quality screen. TI's nSpire models are supposedly good too, but I don't want to spend the money on one because I don't really need it. I didn't need the Casio one either, but the more reasonable price and Python compatibility broke me down.
I remember hearing about TI and their litigations. I really have no use for a graphing calculator anymore, but I turn on my TI-89 every once in awhile just to check out some of the programs I designed for school and to play Phoenix.
You know I still have Phoenix installed in my TI-89.
Though it's because I haven't touched it in forever and it uses nonvolatile flash memory. :)
My Casio graphing calculator actually has a pretty good Gameboy Color emulator on it, though.
Such a great game! Someone needs to make Phoenix for the iPhone and Android.
The Nova Launcher for Android is simply awesome!
What a great list, thanks! I'll check a few out!
I've only played on PC, but I definitely recommend Vampire Survivors and Into the Breach! Both are thoroughly enjoyable games.
Ii strongly recommend trying Connect. I've been using Lemmy much more since I switched over from Jerboa. Connect is more intuitive to me, but there are other apps out there as well, try out a couple of them and you should easily find something that feels more than ok to you. Jerboa is, in my experience, the least polished of the apps available for Lemmy right now.
How’s your experience with Firefox Nightly? I’m currently on the regular Firefox, but I use some developer apps as well.
It's pretty uneventful. I started using it a while back when there was some feature—possibly plugin support, but I don't recall now—that I really wanted but which hadn't made its way into the official app. Either Firefox Beta didn't exist at the time, or I just hadn't found it.
Since I don't really need to be on the edge of development now (unless some other killer feature comes up), I could probably stand to step back to Firefox Beta or Firefox. But I also haven't had any problems using Firefox Nightly, so I don't have a huge incentive to change at the moment.
This is a great guide! Gonna try some of the apps and games you mentioned.
I can vouch for vampire survivors. Very fun game that can be enjoyed in short bursts.
Also can anyone tell me is there an android app for tildes. I am a new user btw.
There is not currently an Android app for Tildes. @talklittle, the developer behind Reddit is Fun, is working on an app called Three Cheers for Tildes, but it's not yet ready for general use.
In the interim, I can recommend just using Tildes through a mobile web browser. I'd personally prefer an app, for a number of personal QOL reasons, but the mobile web interface is quite usable as it is.
Yes, currently using on brave mobile browser but hoping for android apps soon.
I bought Star Traders on sale a while back after hearing rave reviews about it but haven’t really given it much of a play through, unfortunately. I got lost early on with the amount of text and complexity of the tutorials…and lost focus and concentration. I think my mental focus levels drift too quickly for me to focus on a game like that. But I’d love to try and give it the ole’ college try again!
Ticket to Earth looks really cool. I’m super interested in that one. Is it easy to learn and pick up and play? Or more complicated?
I think Ticket To Earth is pretty easy to learn. The basic mechanic is that your characters can move along similar-colored tiles, they change the tiles' colors (deterministically) as they move over them, and some attacks' power scales with the number of tiles traversed. You should get the hang of it pretty quickly.
Simon Tatham's Puzzles is one of the first things I would install. They are simple puzzles that are easy to pick up and put down whenever you have a second to kill. (If you are a sysadmin / developer sort, this is the same Simon Tatham that developed the PuTTY ssh client.)
Downloading - thank you :)
My web browser. I don't use applications that have basically the same functionality as a browser. I add some bookmarks and visit them there. If the website is made to be unbearable on purpose, then I don't go there.
Yes, OP is complaining that the internet has "become very small", yet instead of using a browser to access all the internet, they want to install a few specific apps that only allow them access those few specific web services.
If you want a bigger internet, use a browser. If you want the internet to be 3 websites, then install 3 apps and that's all you're gonna see.
While I see what you're saying, I'm not sure I agree. The web "getting smaller", to me, has much more to do with the dying off of small independent content-focused websites and freedom of client choice (e.g. the ability to use Pidgin, Trillium, Adium, etc to connect to AIM, MSN, etc instead of official clients) than it has to do with using a web app over a native app. Just using a web browser isn't going to change much; Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc are still what they are regardless of if you're using a browser or not.
In my mind, un-shrinking the web means the restoration of those aforementioned indie content sites (blogs, fansites, etc) and putting control back into the hands of users so they can partake of online services in whichever way they please, whether that be via a browser, official app, third party web app, or third party native app. The web was once about conforming to the needs and desires of the user and should in my opinion return to that.
The thing is that native apps, especially those belonging to companies, act as sinks for resources: time, effort, attention, learning, familiarity all come at a cost and we humans intuitively don't give that willingly. We are hardwired to be mentally lazy and avoid effort unless we're bored and seek out stimuli.
So, apps that lock resources and address boredom automatically make the internet less lively and diverse.
If the apps and protocols you access the internet through are the roads of cyberspace, having roads that are bike-only, pedestrian -only, car-only, truck-only, etc. doesn't help the adoption of Highly Trustworthy Transportation Pavements (HTTP).
Agreed, and I believe an over-reliance on apps, all of which develop their own culture, their mannerisms, their crowd, their UX, conventions and more works against that to a certain extent.
Why would people create if all audiences are on Reddit, or on Discord, or you name the walled garden? It's a balancing act, and not an easy one. I've started blogging again, but even friends ask me whether I can post my stuff to X or Y walled garden, which I mostly won't do precisely because I believe comfort works to the detriment of the Internet.
My point is that all you said is true of the web versions of these "apps" too. If none of them had native apps and people accessed them through the web, all that would change is their users would be spending all of that time on those sites instead. Facebook/Reddit/Twitter/etc being web-only does nothing to diminish their nature as habit-forming timesinks that shrink the web, at least in the era of smartphones with fully featured browsers (it might've been a different story in the day of the flip phone and Palm Pilot, where mobile browsers lagged behind their desktop counterparts by 10+ years).
For any of this to change, it will take more than Facebook, etc losing their native apps — the services need to disappear entirely, not even having web versions. Their existence is the problem, not the fact that they have native apps.
This is a central point supporting your position, and I disagree with it. I think you're only considering the perspective of users or information consumers but aren't seeing past that and realizing that a healthy technical ecosystem doesn't only need consumers, it needs creators and technicians equally. If people are spending their time on apps, then suddenly usage of and work on technologies that aren't directly related to those are discouraged little by little. In other words: hype matters, a lot, for the evolution of technology and culture.
Sorry, I still don’t understand, maybe I’m just dense or something.
I agree that creators and technically minded are just as necessary as users, but I don’t see how the big social media sites having native apps or not changes that equation. Even as “just” websites, they’re still sucking all of the air out of the room and making it hard for anything else to exist.
We saw a bit of this when Facebook really started blowing up initially, where the a large portion of not most of the momentum was coming from desktop web users.
Same goes for Reddit which was pure web and didn’t even have an official mobile app until around 2015 or so. Lack of an app didn’t impede its ability to crush small independent forums at all.
That's why we're in the place we're in right now, because people were using mainly the fee very popular apps (reddit, Twitter, Facebook) and as each of these apps shit the bed, people started complaining "oh what happened to the good old internet?"
You!
You happened to it by walling yourself off in your own corner!
I've got a draft about this, it's a longer form rant about how complacency got us here in the first place which I think you might enjoy.
I mean, I have and use a browser. Websites are also welcome, my choices regarding them have become stagnant too!
Spiritual successor to stumbleupon: Cloudhiker.
https://cloudhiker.net/explore
The internet will be bigger for you again. Interesting sites are out there.
YES THANK YOU I HAVE MISSED STUMBLEUPON!
Specifically I recommend Firefox Mobile. It lets you install add-ons like uBlock Origin. Having proper adblocking on a mobile browser is a game changer.
I prefer to use something like DNS66 which blocks ads for the whole device, not just the browser.
I find the whole fake VPN hack a bit cumbersome, though (and rooting the phone is even more cumbersome, sigh). I have AdGuard installed but only enable it for specific apps when I have an issue.
Firefox Focus's default behavior and Firefox with uBlock Origin are really handy if most of your apps are ad-free, but you still want to browse the web in peace.
DNS66 doesn't require root and is pretty much install and go. No additional configuration needed unless you want to start whitelisting URLs.
At least that's been my experience on my Pixel phones.
Yeah, fair. Any particular websites that are good for this?
RIF still works as logged out user. Unless you want to stay away from reddit on principle.
I just noticed this the other day when I opened it based just on instinct. Anyone know why it still works? And more importantly, is it likely to keep working?
Just stopped working for me as of this morning, now it loads endlessly but never displays any posts or error messages.
There are also guides out there to have it keep working logged in by using your own API key
Infinity (Android) is also working, there has been no changes yet. I'm logged in.
Kinda sad for the day that eventually ends..
You might like Medium. It's an essay/article-based media platform. Anyone can write stories -- regular folks, scientists, politicians, actors -- and if people read your work, you might even get a bit of money. You don't have to write anything, though. There is plenty of content to read.
As for games, Bloons TD6 and Stardew Valley are classics. I also like Survive -- a text-based survival game where you are lost in the wilderness, making a series of decisions trying to find your way back to civilization. Armory & Machine is a nice idle level-up game.
Browsing Zillow and Apartments.com is fun too, except when it makes me aware of the fact that I'll never own a home.
Digital books might also be an option for you.
Thanks for the suggestions! Medium sounds a bit like Quora - whose app was/is terrible - so an improvement over that is welcome xD
Bloons ... A throwback! Stardew and Survive are probably too much of a timesink for me right now, but I appreciate it all the same!
Oh man! It's been a long time since I've seen a positive comment about medium. Granted, I've only seen people discussing it on Hacker News where it's hated by virtually everyone.
I used to like it but the aggressive monetization of the platform turned me away from it. It's also used for SEO now with companies publishing keyword-stuffed blogs with links to their websites so there's plenty of useless content on there.
It was (is?) a fantastic writing platform, but it struggled from the same thing all free platforms do, which is how to monetize. Three of four years ago I think they started gating off content, allowing writers to limit articles to only paid users. And a LOT of them took their content (back) to their own personal platforms.
I used to write a bit on there and the commenting system was really nice and fostered some good discussion.
These days I feel like Substack has sort of taken over what Medium wanted to be but I also don't really use substack so :shrug:
I’ve been spending a lot of time on calckey (via the app Kimis) and Tildes (trying out Surfboard and loving it so far!)
I also tend to have between 10 and 20 correspondence Go matches going at any given point on online-go.com, so I’ll usually have a few moves waiting for me on Surround
As a way to kill time, I've been really into Marvel Snap this year. Quick games, low stakes, fun interactions between cards. All the micro transactions are optional/cosmetic, so I don't feel like I fall behind if I don't buy a season pass or bundle.
It's just a simple, fun card game that you can spend 5 minutes playing or go for long sessions trying out new cards. Also you don't particulaly need to be a Marvel fan to enjoy the game. I'm not into the MCU by any means, but I enjoy the card interactions, colorful art, flashy UI, and simple gameplay.
Iirc Sam Black worked as a game design consultant on Snap. So I'm not surprised you're enjoying it. Sam has really impressed me over the years. Has a real knack for conceptualising and communicating game mechanics. I really like his podcast drafting archetypes for mtg limited
Thanks! Less what I'm looking for, but I can see why it's so appealing:)
Recently decided to give an iPhone a try after using a bunch of different Android phones (and ROMs).
Some of my Android musts were:
Things that I used and still use (cross-platform) stuck with me:
I'll just +1 for Vivaldi. It's so so so good.
Thanks for the other suggestions too!
Are you sure Vivaldi has extension support on Android? It's chrome based
Ah, my bad, I mis-remembered! It in fact doesn't have extension support.
afaik, firefox and kiwi are the only onew with extension support on android. (yandex used to have it but they restricted it to 3 or so extensions)
Regarding having to reinstall sideloaded apps every seven days, have you checked out Altstore? It automates that process for you and also provides a more convenient way to sideload apps without having to tether to a computer after the initial setup
I'll check it out, thanks for the suggestion!
What do you like about Obsidian.md over other note taking apps?
Free, future proof (Markdown files), offline mode, local device stored, able to sync for free with iCloud Drive and other personal sync drives (also offers an encrypted paid version by Obsidian Sync, optional) linking notes, plugin support.
Nick Milo's "Linking Your Thinking" (LYT) Toolkit is a cool way to get introduced to it and play around with this example "vault" (file system for Obsidian).
Awesome! I'll have to check it out. I'm always on the lookout for better note systems. The syncing and Markdown are huge pluses.
I've tried Logseq but their weird way of handling MD files was very quickly off-putting. I'd rather my files be backwards compatible with other apps.
On my work Macbook I use(d) Nota but was unable to find a worthy, lightweight companion/counterpart on Android/iOS/Windows.
Tilla looks exactly like Bobby on iOS.
Yeah, screw gmail. Used to be great, now awful. I am using spark as a substitute but that isn't great either. For eg, if you get an email from a new source, it will prompt you to accept or block, but if you pick block it will ask you to upgrade to use the feature.
I might give fastmail a go.
I love fastmail and how I can organize everything automagically.
And don't get me started on the masked email addresses.
I would love to get Obsidian into my daily routine, but for whatever reason can’t focus for long enough to sit down and figure out how to use it and get it to work for me. Any suggestions?
I would suggest skimming through something like this, or just head-dive into trying out all the features of it.
I'm still not very well versed on Obsidian-ism, but getting there.
I just kinda force myself to brain dump everything first, then make coherent connections between the different pages.
Sync- or well, I still press the icon more than any other one on my phone daily. Although it doesn't do much anymore..
Edit; I actually put the Tildes icon in its place, but my muscle memory seems to be aided by my brain looking for the icon so that didn't help much lol
:'(
iOS apps that haven't been mentioned yet that I love:
Brave: the only browser that has a built-in adblock for iPhones, as far as I can tell. I uninstalled YouTube and watch it there. They can't make me see ads.
Chance: lovingly crafted 4chan and alt-chan viewer with a very active and responsive developer. It does captcha solving and cloudflare logins, and it even lets you do read-only Reddit if you so desire. Dev's a "scrapechad", so he's not affected by API changes.
Discord: mobile discord is noticeably clunky and bloated, but I use it to chat with friends.
ChatGPT: they let you hit the Whispr API for free on the mobile app. I just copy the text and use it elsewhere. Lmao
Amazon: shittiest big company mobile app ever; they should be ashamed of how fucking slow it is. Still have it on my phone though.
I've been trying out Orion as my main browser the last few weeks, it also blocks ads if you're ever wanting to try out something other than Brave
Browser: Brave, Firefox Focus, Onion Browser
News: Feedly Classic, Axios, NY Times, browser
Reading: Books (iPhone), Pocket
OpSec: Nord VPN, Signal, Bitwarden
Games: Wings of Heroes, Into the Dead 2, Solitaire, Chess
Wildfire/Weather: Watch Duty, Wildfire Info, Flightradar 24, CalTopo, Purple Air, Wunderground, ISEE/JPSS, GOES, CHPMap Lite, Broadcastify, CARR (I live in rural Northern California. Days of temps to 105F in the shade and AQI's to 2,000 with ash falling from the sky are just another summer's day.)
Music, algorithmic: Pandora, Spotify
Music, human-curated: Bandcamp, NTS Radio, The Lot, PsychedRadio, KEXP Radio
Music, performances: Songkick, Dice, Bandsintown, Jam Base
Driving: Google Maps, Dash Cam
Calendar: Time Tree
Dinner Out: Google Maps, Time Out, Infatuation, Resy, OpenTable
TL; DR- If you live in wildfire territory, check out some of these apps. They can be life saving.
I only install open-source things onto my phone. All available from https://f-droid.org/ .
I don't do email on my phone, but for those interested, there's K-9 Mail and FairEmail.
I'm a beer lover and religiously use untappd to keep track of beers I've had, what I rate them, and where I had them.
I joined instagram :/ don't like it, especially compared to old reddit (but haven't been back to RIF since the protest). Joined a few years ago to just post updates to family/friends during covid and divorce. but scrolling more, i get some "news" (titanic sub thing, i-95 collapse) and memes. (hacked version to block sponsered content but theres a lot of hidden ads too)
OR just off the phone:
4) library books
5) Retro gaming handheld
One that isn't a timewaster, but was indispensable when I was without a car: the Transit app (it's cross platform and just called that). Has real time bus and train schedules in damn near every city I've been to that has public transit, and at least in mine allows you to buy tickets for transit directly inside the app. It also seems to handle trips that require using different transit agencies (for example, I took a trip down to Colorado Springs from Denver a few years ago, and it handled the RTD - CDOT Bustang - Springs Metro Transit coordination super well.
There's also KDE Connect, which links your phone to a desktop/laptop (despite the name, there's both an extension for GNOME and a Windows app for it as well. I'm unsure about the macOS situation though. Makes copying things between them and answering texts when my phone is charging pretty damn easy.
Can I get some recommendations for audiobook apps with good UX/UI?
I don't love the Audible app and I'd prefer to avoid Amazon when possible. I've used Libby, but I don't do well with rentals so I usually forget to finish the books on time, or lose interest in the topic by the time my hold gets fulfilled.
I'll be honest, I haven't used it in a couple years so I don't remember much about the UI, but I used Smart Audiobook for a few years to listen to books at work, always seemed to work well for me
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ak.alizandro.smartaudiobookplayer
Libro.fm is similar to Audible, but supports a local bookstore of your choosing instead of Bezos. The app only plays books, you have to browse/buy from a PC (helps them avoid paying Google anything).
As for Libby, I have a bit of a trick I do. Every time I place a hold, I also delay the hold for the maximum 6 months. I keep extending the hold until I want to listen to it. Even after delaying a hold, you still move up in line. So I'm first in line for every hold I have set, I just need to remove the hold and I usually get the book within a day. Helps to have a big backlog or to go through books slowly lol
RIF....wait
Too soon. RIP RIF.
So strangely enough, I never logged into RIF and it's still working for me... I've read articles that say if you weren't logged in it's still working, but not sure how long it will last.
Also trying not to use it because he's going to end up getting charged now for it...
Boost is also working. I heard some apps negotiated with Reddit, maybe that's the case with these?
As is Infinity. I wondered the same because I get ads on boost, but not infinity.