Simple Mobile apps have been very popular among FOSS enthusiasts. I've personally been using the Gallery, Contacts and the Phone app since a few years now. It's a shame that it has come to this, will be on the lookout for their forks.
Because freeloaders who call themselves "open source enthusiasts" aren't really good at supporting people who create them. It's often quite the opposite. Rude, entitled, and ungrateful bunch of whiners that want everything free and some more. Then act surprised after their favorite opensource app is shutdown, sold or archived.
This guy even had paid apps on the playstore so whoever says "but opensouce doesn't mean you can't sell em" can fuck right off.
And you think the solution is to sell to a company that will instantly add data mining and ads? Often to those users, for whom we have installed these apps, but from google play for the automatic updates?
That one doesnt have the security vulnerability and I think it is also better. But they are pretty much equal.
Simple Gallery - Aves
I prefer Simple Gallery though, it is pretty great
Simple dialer - Welefon
Very basic, I personally use ACR phone for call recording, with disabled internet permissions. The Dev asked on Reddit about opensourcing the App and got negative responses, so maybe unlikely.
Simple Keyboard - Florisboard
Currently unmaintained but awesome. I hope it gets revived.
Oh no, those apps have replaced many of the OEM' supplied ones on all my devices. I was fed up with constantly changing UIs and all the different feature sets on every device. I thought I had finally found something useful to consolidate on for the long term!
At least the current versions are pretty bug free and will stay.
From the comment thread it sounds like the contract might be on shaky ground. The original dev seems to be under the impression that a project licensed under GPLv3 can just be freely changed to another license, which it cannot without explicit consent from all contributors. We don't know the contract language of course, but the dev said it would "likely" not remain open source, which indicates that he told them they could change it. ZippApps' lawyers will hopefully notice that and refuse to buy, though either way we shouldn't trust this maintainer again and should move to the forks.
his last comment before closing the thread suggests that "99%" of the code is controlled by him and other paid contributors. still seems like you'd have to manually contact the last 1% to relicense their code.
I'd like to think he was just trying to be respectful of the author, probably having worked quite a bit together. But he changed his mind pretty quickly when he saw the original author had totally checked out. Maybe that's a generous reading though.
So this just looks like the Community has to take care of the projects and/or find alternatives
Alternatives
File manager - Material Files
That one doesnt have the security vulnerability and I think it is also better. But they are pretty much equal.
Simple Gallery - Aves
I prefer Simple Gallery though, it is pretty great
Simple dialer - Welefon
Very basic, I personally use ACR phone for call recording, with disabled internet permissions. The Dev asked on Reddit about opensourcing the App and got negative responses, so maybe unlikely.
Simple Keyboard - Florisboard
Currently unmaintained but awesome. I hope it gets revived.
Dann that is nice!I It will probably be the replacement for people needing autocomplete!
Testint it currently and I think it is the perfect replacement for iPhone people as the cursor thing is similar.
I love the granular autocorrection as I would set only suggestions without correction if the language was new to me.
I will stick with Florisboard though, I prefer the pitch black dark mode (and dont need anything else) and I love the internal clipboard, history, deletion etc. It is so much better for privacy.
Also the text editing shortcuts are great and needed for the clipboard.
Thank you for the recommendations! Material Files seems to work well, I've been struggling to find a file manager that doesn't reset the date modified metadata when transferring photos to the SMB shares on my NAS. Several folders of hundreds of photos now have completely incorrect dates attached to them because of a file manager I used previously :(
So far from my testing Material Files does not do this!
Edit: it's extremely slow though lol, that's weird. 250 small photos took several seconds each.
In recent times the developer has been showing some serious miscommunication and other issues regarding their apps. Just look at their terrible handling of the vulnerabilities found in their file manager's pdf reader (See his responses to the report)
Since around that time, I've been looking for alternatives to their apps, but I've kept using some of them because I couldn't find anything that feels as good to use. I guess now I'm forced to really look for those alternatives, or see if there's any serious fork that still gets actively maintained weeks from now.
So now I have to contact all the family members where I removed the bloatware and replaced with the smt apps, uninstall them before the "just 39 euro per week for adfree" subscription scam starts, find suitable replacements, train people to get used to new icons...
When ZipoApps adds advertisements and telemetry to a future version of the Simple Mobile Tools apps, will my Google-Play-installed apps be automatically updated to the newer version with ads and telemetry? I don't want ZipoApps to get any of my data.
Yes. If you have automatic updates enabled, it will install the newest version with trackers and ads. You could disable the automatic update for these apps and hope they stay relevant to your os for a little while.
I would also recommend switching ASAP. You can make a backup of their internal data with App Manager (available from f-droid) which you can then restore to the f-droid version
Even if it's removed from fdroid because they want to close source it, I assume my current installations of their apps would be unaffected - just become stale and obsolete over time since they won't get updates... But as they're offline anyway, not too concerned in the short term.
Hopefully the company respects the privacy amd care of the open source community and won't take that away from us, though. One way to find out.
I also was an user but Aves Libre is a very good replace if you don't mind the video editing aspect. But yeah, that app also probably deserve a good fork.
Damn it. I use their Gallery since it allows me to hide/show folders easily using a fingerprint lock. I guess I'll just keep an old version until it no longer works.