• Audile: offline, trackerless music recognition.
• Keepassdx + Heliboard: both excellent apps in their own right that create a smoother experience of mundane phone use, but they also integrate rather well together and Heliboard will often pop Keepassdx in to its suggestion bar when you enter a log in page. It's been really nice for me.
• FUTO voice input: speech to text for those who don't want to use Google speech services. Frankly, the FUTO app works better than googles app anyways, it always handles grammar correctly as long as you speak relatively clearly, and integrates with Heliboard nicely.
• Tailscale: for those who need VPN access to their other devices.
• Thunder : a Lemmy client with compatibility with Lemmy's recent server side changes and also has a decent UI/UX
• tasks.org: fantastic, customizable to do app with various syncing options.
• Magic Earth: privacy respecting maps/directions for those who don't want google maps. (NOTE: closed source. Here is the privacy policy, terms of use and description of their business model at the bottom of their FAQ)
• Myne: e-book downloader.
• Markdownr: convert webpages to markdown. Great option for mobile, if I'm on desktop I use the Joplin web clipper plug in for Firefox.

Seconding Newpipe, excellent app.

EDIT: added links to the terms, policies and FAQ of Magic Earth, as it is not open source.

Image Toolbox

Basically anything you could ever want to do with an image, you can do with this app.
Crop, rotate, resize, compress, draw, stitch, apply filter, remove background, watermark, OCR, remove EXIF, pick color, generate palette, turn into PDF, turn into GIF, it's a lot.

• Gadgetbridge - If you have compatible fitness/smart watch. keeps data local
• OpenTracks - Tracking your run/walk/hikes. keeps data local
• Organic Maps - Offline Maps and navigation
• Feeder - RSS reader
• Syncthing-fork -Syncing files across devices
• mpv-android - Fast no frills video player.

All available on F-Droid

Antenna Pod: Hands down the best podcast app, closed and open source alike

The Power Off button gives a great quality of life experience.

KeePassDX (and its associated keyboard, Magikeyboard)

Which qualities would you like to improve?

I use a regular Pixel 6 pro, but there are a few things I keep around to improve the q.o.l. for using android itself.

• Nova launcher to simplify things a bit and give me more search engine options

• Firefox as my default browser with ad blocking add-ons to maintain some sanity

• Solid Explorer to do file system stuff

Built in stuff:

• Bedtime mode is a nice reminder to stop and go to bed

• Focus mode is nice to stop casual social app usage according to a schedule

• Flip to Shhh is great for... shushing. When flipped.

• Do Not Disturb is my default mode. Only to be turned off when I'm actively awaiting interaction.

• Notifications turned off for almost everything, always.

blokada, dailyyou, antennapod, feeder, ntfy.sh, geometric weather, openboard :3

p!n will pin a note to the notification tray for a set amount of time.

Fossify phone bundle, phone, contacts, messages, files, gallery. :B

Better Open With: because recent Android versions forcing you to just select one app to open each type of link sucks balls. With this, you can go vack to the way it was before - having a choice of app every time you tap a link. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.aboutmycode.betteropenwith

Hey, maybe that will be useful: github.com/Psyhackological/AAA

Most of mine relate to my home network/server/services. Like Wireguard, connectbot, netanalyzer.

But outside of that, KDE Connect/GSconnect for phone to desktop stuff.

Carrion is a recent add. Additional spam call filtering.

Also still using the f-droid versions of the Simple apps suite.

Clipeus is also nice for purging your clipboard.

https://github.com/TrackerControl/tracker-control-android

Simple Solitaire Collection from F-Droid: https://f-droid.org/packages/de.tobiasbielefeld.solitaire/

It's super soothing.

Trackercontrol, obtainium, openboard, and newpipe