This article lists and reviews the apps I installed after setting up GrapheneOS. If you are looking for privacy-friendly, essential, or recommended apps for a de-Googled Android experience, this is the place to start.
Once GrapheneOS is installed, you have a basic phone but not much else. The Graphene App Store is minimal. I installed their Messaging app and a PDF Viewer, but GrapheneOS focuses on the OS, not bundled apps—which is one of the reasons I chose it.
Important: You will be downloading a lot of apps. I turned on WiFi and connected my phone to my home network—much faster and cheaper than using mobile data.
Next, I customized the phone by installing the apps I use. These are mostly the same privacy/security-focused apps I used on stock Android. Your choices may differ, but here’s my list:
| App | Description |
|---|---|
| Davx5 | Syncs NextCloud with Contacts and Calendar using DAV |
| FreeOTP+ | Excellent OTP program |
| K-9 Mail | My go-to program for mail on smartphones |
| Monocles Chat | Good XMPP chat program for my job |
| NC Password | Not as secure as I’d like, but still a good password manager |
| Nextcloud | Access your files from your cell phone |
| Nextcloud Notes | Good note-taking app (markdown) from NextCloud |
| Calendar | Nice and clean Calendar program available on F-Droid |
| OSMAnd | Mapping program with trip planning |
| VLC | Excellent cross-platform media player |
| Sky Map | Nice replacement for Stellarium? |
| wX | Weather tool (actually, for storm chasers) |
| μlogger | Lets family see where I am on long trips |
All of these were installed using F-Droid. The first task was to download and install F-Droid:
Once F-Droid was installed, I installed the rest of the software from the list above. Downloading and installing all the apps took longer than the GrapheneOS install itself!
Some were simple, some were hard.
Davx5, Nextcloud, NC Password, and Nextcloud Notes were fairly simple for me to set up since I’ve used Nextcloud for a while. Open each program, point it to your Nextcloud instance, and you’re ready to go.
When configuring Davx5, you choose which calendars and contacts you want on your phone. Syncing can take a while—after about half an hour, all my calendar and contact entries were present. I did have to re-mark my ‘favorites’ in the Contacts list.
If you’re coming from Google, you can export your contacts as vCard and your calendars as CalDAV, then import them into Nextcloud.
I host the μlogger server on my website, so I knew the URL and credentials. No need for export/import.
Had to set up my location, but that was simple. Just make sure you’re outside so the GPS can find you.
For these apps, I exported the configuration on the old phone to the Nextcloud client, then imported it on the new phone by opening the app and doing an import.
K-9 requires you to re-enter your passwords, but everything else is configured just by export/import.
This was a pain—mainly because it’s a large, complex program that I didn’t have much experience with. Plan on spending some time downloading maps. I’m in North Texas and travel to Oklahoma and New Mexico, so I downloaded maps for all of those.
No configuration needed.