This is going to be a fairly simple post. I just want to share some of the things I’ve been enjoying on GrapheneOS lately, although they’re not necessarily related to GrapheneOS and more of Android in general! Honestly, things have gotten pretty good for my use case recently:
Accrescent keeps getting updates and is getting better with each one! The app repository is still limited, but it’s expanded to add a number of apps that I actually use. Best of all, they’re the kind of apps that a lot of people would use. GrapheneOS ships their repo in the built-in app “store”, which is also very nice! Here’s what I’ve enjoyed using (and most of this I was already using, interestingly enough:
Auxio is a great and good-looking offline music player. It just works really well, supports the basic quality of life features, and fits in really well with the design philosophy of modern android. This is essentially what I listen to all of my music on, I really enjoy using it.
Organic Maps is still my favorite application for mapping! It’s great for trails and walking, and is even great for driving to be honest (although it doesn’t calculate traffic, which can be a deal-breaker for many, including me at times). However, it works when I need it for driving, and I will use it for when I’m moving around without a car. Another very great application.
IronFox is a newer project that seeks to continue the work of Mull, which unfortunately stopped receiving updates. I know just as much about it as I do any of the mobile firefox applications, but it seems to be the best. Mull was already way ahead of the others in terms of hardening, and IronFox continues that, which is nice. Everything I use seems to “just work” as well, so it seems like a great drop-in replacement for something like Firefox, Iceraven, or Fennec.
Molly is exactly what it says on the tin! It’s an improved Signal app, and Accrescent comes with the FOSS version that strips the proprietary bits that I honestly can’t see most people, if any people, using (while replacing with alternatives for what people do use). Molly also supports UnifiedPush, which is really nice for GrapheneOS notifications, and once I learned how to get it going, it works so smoothly! Molly also supports regular notifications that run with Google Play Services, and it also supports running in the background to send notifications (although this is a bit more of a battery drainer and is spotty, I would honestly just use UnifiedPush over this). Molly is great!
Accrescent also ships the basics! There’s a really good-looking note application that follows modern android design, a flashlight application that allows for adjusting brightness and automatically flashing morse code, ExifEraser for cleaning metadata, and AppVerifier, which is quite useful when it comes to the second half of this :D
Obtanium ships the rest of the goods! AppVerifier from before makes the process of checking package integrity very simple, and Obtanium grabs the packages straight from a multitude of sources, from Github, to Gitlab, to Fdroid and even generic websites with APK links! Here’s what I’ve got from here, although a lot of this hasn’t changed since the last time I made a post similar to this idk when:
Breezy Weather continues to be the best weather app I have ever seen, period. Better than the proprietaries, better than the stock, and best of all, they have both the regular version and the fdroid version on their github, so you can use whichever you want!
Fossify is still great for a lot of the basic, although I’ve replaced a couple of these since last time (ex. notes). Still great for a clean and minimal phone, sms, calculator, calendar, etc. while being functional and FOSS.
PipePipe is the only thing that consistently gets around YouTube’s efforts to block third-party clients and services, and it works great. It’s a FOSS YouTube client that allows for easy ad-free viewing and easy downloading. It also supports a variety of other services, including PeerTube! If you’ve heard of Newpipe, it’s very similar and started as a fork, though has diverged since, and as such is able to implement workarounds to blocking much faster than newpipe tends to.
ntfy is the greatest discovery of recent times. Remember when I was talking about UnifiedPush notifications before? This is it. It’s seamless push notifications for anything from Molly to Element X (the everything client, enjoy my inside joke 
) , and it makes it so these apps don’t have to run in the background (or can actually support push notifications in the case of Element X. This is honestly a must for any android user, especially if you’re using applications that might support UnifiedPush, whether it’s in addition to traditional push notifications through Google or exclusively UnifiedPush. It’s genuinely great, has saved so much battery life already, and allows me to get notifications from my lovely friends over on the glorious matrix protocol.
But yeah, that’s all I’ve got for now. I hope you liked my app showcase, it only took until my third or fourth post of this kind to finally get the wording right and not sound either condescending or elitist or whatever. It’s never been my intention, I just want to share software that I enjoy, and I want you to use it if you find it interesting. Some of this might be more use-case or threat model specific, but a lot of these are just great for any user, and I mean any. So yeah, I hope you all have a wonderful day/night/dusk 
Why do you prefer accrescent to f-droid? I didn’t know about it before now. From poking around on their github repo it seems that it is not a very mature project so its surprising that graphene packages it by default. I see accrescent hosts open and closed source packages with no distinction between them. At least as of a few months ago. More like arch linux; libertarian. But unlike arch, targeted at non-technical users who would be scared or put off by any mention of open source.
Everything you are getting from obtainium is available on the main f-droid repo. I feel like I trust those nerds more and try to get everything I can through there. I guess ultimately these accrescent people are doing a different thing which is trying to offer an alternative app store for some other reason. Do you think they are planning to monetize?
GrapheneOS community mantra is to shit on F-Droid because “they sign the apks themselves instead of letting developers sign” and “they may take a long time to update packages, which can be bad for security”. These two reasons are mainly why Accrescent and Obtainium get recommended instead, although I’m sure F-Droid being very serious about FOSS is an extra, unspoken source of friction. The claim that F-Droid packages are not signed by developers is not even true for many packages nowadays and, personally, I don’t get this obsession over signing keys anyway. I posted this before but I think Emacs Android README conveys my thoughts on this rather eloquently:
26. Your signing keys are public! You clearly aren't concerned with security. We realize that our signing keys are available to the public, and it follows, to potential malefactors. It does not alarm us in the least: restricting the right to publish upgrades to a software installation to its publisher contradicts the basic tenets of the Free Software movement. If this heavy-handed Android practice commends itself to you, because you hold so little faith in the soundness of your judgement that you may be vulnerable to malware impersonating Emacs, we suggest installing Emacs from F-Droid instead, who, for reasons inexplicable to us, treat their package signing keys as jealously guarded secrets.That being said, if someone does believe that developers signing apks improves security and if this additional security is relevant to them, then Obtainium (with AppVerifier) and Accrescent are the best available solutions today.
GrapheneOS community mantra is to shit on F-Droid
Just want to make it absolutely clear here that I did not mean to say that this is what comrade AshenWolf is doing or that kit’s recommendation is wrong. I was rather referring to something that happens everytime someone mentions F-Droid in GrapheneOS spaces like their Discord server – they get bombarded with claims that F-Droid is “not recommended” and “not secure” with very few people who claim this being able to explain why.
Yea I get that 😅. Of course it’s just FOSS drama, I really should have known…
I thinl that while f-droid still has flaws (longer waits for updates is the big one, whether it be for security or just getting new things sooner), I really do like that it’s only FOSS software. While Obtanium takes a more “pick and choose” approach and doesn’t have any apps it offers by default, Accrescent, even if it’s mostly FOSS, still does. Although I did discover they plan to impliment tags and filters (was looking into things more after I stopped postting), I still feel like their statement of “proprietary software isn’t less private or secure than foss” just ignores the whole transparency aspect (again something I found last night after posting).
I personally mix all of them depending on what I need the app for. For the 2FA app, I use Obtainium to make sure I always get updates as fast as possible. For most everything else, F-Droid, which prevents me from using proprietary software by accident. If something I know is FOSS is on Accrescent, like the IronFox browser, I don’t mind using that. And Emacs is a special one – the Android port author recommends getting the latest builds on sourceforge and I do that, keeping in mind the security issues.
While saying that proprietary apps are not less secure than FOSS isn’t necessarily wrong, this view of GrapheneOS and Accrescent devs conveniently skirts the issue of software freedom, which I think is a bad approach in the long term. Projects like GrapheneOS wouldn’t have been allowed to exist in the first place if not for the free software movement and licensing forcing Google to keep Android relatively open.
Certainly with you on all of this, and F-Droid certainly seems like the only way to guarantee that the software is free software. It might be worth playing around with in the future for things that might not need the quickest updates (like a notes app or a music player, and even F-Droid supports custom repos when devs offer it, even IronFox does.
Well for Accrescent, it’s still a newer project, but I do think they work with all of the developers of the apps they keep on there (at least last I heard slash for now). It also does seem to distinguish between libre and non-libre versions of software (with Aves, for example), and I don’t know if any of the others are, I haven’t looked into them or used them. Obtanium does a similar thing, where it takes the apks straight from the devs github/other sources (even fdroid if needed). I was using f-droid for a while, but (and I’m not technical, I just use the software) I believe there are issues with the SDK(?) being built for older versions of android, and I had also heard of there being issues involving replacing the devs signing keys. Additionally, the UI on Accrescent and Obtainium are also frankly much easier for me to navigate and look at, and unless you’re only using the main fdroid repo and no custom repos, it proves to be a much easier process as well.
All in all, I’ve heard f-droid has issues, and it didn’t look great anyway, and I’ve found better and smoother-working solutions. This post was meant to be more about the apps than how they were distributed (just thought it was neat, tbh), and it’s something I’ve been tweaking a bit lately and wanted to share. I’m sure there’s arguments to be made for f-droid, but many people I’ve talked to, and many sources I’ve seen (that I do not want to have to find, I’m using this as my personal experience, please take it as an anecdote and not as a concrete source/evidence) recommend Obtanium at least, and I’m willing to put my trust in GrapheneOS with Accrescent (although again, I had heard of it and used it before), considering how limited the software options in their app “store” are. If you have anything to say about f-droid, I will hear it out and would like to learn, but I really don’t want to get into a debate on this. I don’t mean to be hostile or overly defensive, but this always happens with these kinds of discussions, and it’s frankly shit for my mental health, so if I just disengage out of nowhere it’s nothing personal, I promise
Nice, I also like FluffyChat.
Yea FluffyChat is amazing! Perhaps I should have brought it up 😅. ntfy and UnifiedPush allow for notifications with it as well, which is nice.
