VocalPitchMonitor is an old app I still use a lot. it's a tuner, but graphed over time, with references for each octave and musical notes. I find that format to be way more useful than just a point-in-time instant tuner, as you adjust the pitch and see how it changes intuitively, get used to the uneven steps of the diatonic scale, etc. it also can conveniently do a quick recording.

I started using this for gender voice training, but these days I use it also to practice musical instruments such as the shinobue or the otamatone, see if I'm in tone or if my bends are bendy enough. I even use it as a quick sample recorder app, just by virtue of being used to it.

in my memory it was a proprietary app but free of ads or microtransactions and asking no weird permissions. but now that I look, it actually asks for your location and sends network data. I mean mine never did ask for location and my ROM won't let it accessed without asking first. but my ROM allows network by default. never realised this app does this, and if it was ever changed, I didn't see when the change happened.

maybe it's something relatively innocent, user metrics and whatnot, it's still few permissions without asking for your contacts or anything
https://play.google.com/store/apps/datasafety?id=com.tadaoyamaoka.vocalpitchmonitor

but when you think about it, it's an app that by nature you'll give microphone permissions, and it sends data home that I don't know about.

it's fascinating how common this kind of stuff is now; about every app asks for the weirdest of things… my ROM can disable network access per app, and I'll keep this pitch app installed under these restricted conditions, for now. I wish that disabling network access was the default…

There's Firefox Klar, which you can get on F-droid via Guardian Project. but I've come to distrust the Mozilla Foundation quite strongly. instead I went with Fennec, and spent some time configuring it to have Klar-style behaviour: no browser data or passwords saved, no tabs saved, no sync, no nothing. plus I installed ublock origin and the recommended url tracker cleaner extensions, both set to allowed in private mode tabs, and made private mode the default for opened links.

this is only secondarily to increase my privacy—I mean that's a nice thing to have given the political conjuncture but also I shouldn't do any sensitive thing on an Android in the first place, given the political conjuncture. but it's more to act as a friction and disincentive—I'm not likely to toot on inpulse if I have to laboriously unlock my Bitwarden (all biometrics are disabled long ago and I think yours should be too) and manually copy-paste username and password to log into mastodon.

- Pl@ntNet: I'll probably try to get good at identifying plants the low-tech way in the future but there's absolutely nothing wrong with this app and I'll keep it for now.

- SkyMap: The only good Google app, until it de-Googled itself. now just a great app generally. point it at the sky and learn to find stars. then late tell your girlfriends "ah, there's Betelgeuse" like you know you're doing and impress them.

- Pleco, EBPocket: Chinese and Japanese writing systems are way easier to look up in a touch screen.

- Aard2: Offline portable dictionaries for hundreds of languages is genuinely a good thing. Unlike auto-translators, dictionaries make me engage with the languages too.

- Voice (audiobook player): Would like to replace this by an MP3 player at some point but again, absolutely no problem with this open source app. It plays audiobooks and that's it.

- Lineal: It's a ruler. It measures things, in centimetres. Could add a ruler to my EDC but I've often used this ruler.

- Trail Sense: Just does everything you could possibly want from a hiking/outdoors/adventure/etc. app, while being open source and non-evil.

- YNAB: could save a 100€ per year and increase privacy if I get used to doing envelope budgeting on my bujo. still the app makes it legit as convenient as it could be, I tried for many years to find an alternative that works for me and never could, and given how crucial regular budgeting and transaction tracking has been for me, I'll unwean from this really carefully.

- calendar with Nextcloud syncing: in some ways it's useful, like quickly saving iCal events (a format that has miraculously survived the cloud era) and get them shared in my family calendar. on the other hand "I have to look at my cellphone to check my important appointments" becomes a habit and that's a habit that draws me to the addiction machine. if instead I relied more on the bujo future spread, that would increase the chance of me using the bujo generally, i.e. change a temptation into a thing that's proven to be great for me.

- k-9 mail: Realistically speaking I can simply train myselves to check emails once per day like in the old times, there's nothing that needs to be checked more urgently than that… but the idea of missing a message from my therapist still makes it scary to uninstall it somehow… at any rate it's not like I lose a lot of time on email of all things…

- Disaster warning app: I don't like to *depend* on knowing it's there, you know? Ideally I'd like to also build a habit of checking for those things in sources that do not depend on cellphone infra, the first thing to go when there's catastrophes… but I still like to know it's there—and thus my bondage to the smartphone is reinforced…

- SnapSeed: I like the spotlight feature for editing photos and how quick and streamlined the app is. Will probably miss this but eh.

- Bandcamp: Pretty terrible app but still the most convenient way to access my Bandcamp collection. the prospect of having to download and sync every song I buy to an MP3 player, make playlists manually etc. isn't joy-inducing. keeping it for now until I decide to do something about it.

- DeepL: Machine translation is genuinely useful, but overall I think translator apps have damaged my polyglot skills more than helped. the idea of having a translator on your pocket sounds like good for emergencies and sometimes it might even be, but I feel like over the years it also disconnects me from my environment more and more. (if I was in an emergency and could not convey something in German what would I do? I would probably ask, spricht hier jemand Englisch? Ich brauche Hilfe. maybe I would have met a friend that way.) how often have I been in situations where an autotranslator was actually really necessary for an emergency and there was no other way to go about it?