Recently in the Fediverse @joel@fosstodon.org announced a blog post he had written about some niche FOSS mobile apps that he has found useful and I thought that is a great idea if everybody did that. So here's my pick.

You can find all of them on F-Droid by clicking on the section title.

Notally - Minimalist Notes

This is a very nicely done minimalist note taking app that essentially does only two things: make checklists, and make freetext notes. You can send them out via the normal sharing mechanism, it can import and export complete bundles of notes as PDF, text, XML, JSON, and HTML, and that's pretty much it. There's no cloudy stuff, it doesn't require any permissions, oh and of course there's a dark mode.

openScale

An open weight tracker app that allows you to track weight manually and display all kinds of fancy graphs. On top of that it also supports a growing number of "smart" scales that report data via Bluetooth. If you have one of those this is probably your best bet to get away from the horrible apps provided by the scale manufacturers. And yes, of course it also has a dark mode. :-)

Gas Prices

Germany has a central fuel price registry that filling stations are required to report their prices into at every change. This registry can be queried via an API provided by registered organizations. One of them is tankerkoenig.de. After registering yourself there for free, the app helps you to check prices around you, or via custom lists of stations that might be on your commute.

If you live close to or travel through Germany regularly this is a very handy app to have. I believe this to be the only price checker app that a) works on phones without Google Mobile Services and b) isn't chock-full of ads and trackers.

Zapp

And while on the subject of German things, Zapp is a great app for browsing the German TV's "Mediatheken". Those are the Video-on-Demand libraries which contain broadcast material from a bunch of different stations, and they include quite nice documentations, concert recordings, and childrens' programs. It is actually a great resource also for studying the German language.

The usual Mediathek GUIs are horrible bloated Java programs, but Zapp is extremely snappy and convenient. You can also download shows for later viewing or archival.

So that's my quick rundown of apps you've never heard of. I hope you find this somewhat useful.