In France they for some reason like to be free and in control. So the French culture is much supportive towards any free and open approaches to life. This obviously also includes software and technology so in France there exist a large crowd trying to push and promote the use of open source and free software. Like fx. April (Association pour la Promotion et la Recherche en Informatique Libre = Association for the Promotion and Study of Free Computing, see also april.org) and Framasoft (framasoft.org).
French companies have found niches to operate in this technology field, like Bootlin, /e/ (Murena), Linagora and also different events regarding free software are held. One such is the Capitol du Libre held in Toulouse 16.-17. November (also hosting a MiniDebConf) at which the CEO of Bootlin, Michael Opdenacker, are going to give a talk about free software Android mobile applications.
He asked on Linkedin for input on applications people use, below is my answer (links and licenses added here for convenience, text limitations on LinkedIn prevented that in original post);
Noticed your talk earlier today, good topic for a general public event.
I use free software mobile applications (mostly from F-Droid) whenever I can. License is the prime criteria when I choose an application.
My daily drivers are:
- Aegis – MFA/TOTP (GPL-3.0-only)
- AntennaPod – audcast/podcast (GPL-3.0-only)
- Etar – calendar (GPL-3.0-only)
- Fennec – firefoxy browser (MPL-2.0)
- K-9 Mail – mail client (to become Thunderbird) (Apache-2.0)
- KISS Launcher – no fuzz find-what-you-need launcher (no widgets!) (GPL-3.0-only)
- OpenTracks – fitness tracker (Apache-2.0)
- OsmAnd – navigation and OSM inspection (GPL-3.0-only)
- QKSMS (replaced by QUIK SMS, GPL-3.0-only) – no frills texting
- Vespucci – contribute to OSM (Apache-2.0)
- yetCalc – math! (BSD-3-clause)
Worth mentioning:
