Pipes

This is a collection of apps that aims to replace the ecosystem feel of proprietary ecosystems like Apple and Google, but with 100% open-source apps.

Unlike other open-source ecosystems, all apps in Modern Apps are built using modern technologies: Jetpack Compose, Material 3 You, etc, which makes them "look nice" and easy to read for those who wish to audit the code.

I also highly encourage people to read the code of these apps, even if you are just a beginner in Kotlin / Android app dev. All apps are structured to be as beginner friendly and readable as possible. It's good to understand the apps that are running on your phone.

This ecosystem also contains apps that aren't as well covered by the open-source ecosystem - particularly Find Family (a location sharing app), YouPipe (a privacy-based youtube frontend), Email (an email client that supports push notifications and a functional dark mode widget), the upcoming Maps (which supports public transit routing, a feature missing from existing alternatives), and the upcoming Messages (a aggregator for other messaging apps).

This ecosystem also includes games, which I personally believe are an important part of a good phone experience (at least the kind from the "golden age" of mobile games are), so I have remade some mobile games I enjoyed and might add more as time goes on.

My Motivations I personally use every app here. My motivation for creating these apps is because I want to use them. I share them because it's the right thing to do, and because collaboration will only help bring this large project to fruition.

History of Modern-Apps (and Vayun Mathur) The history of Modern-Apps goes long before this repository was created. 3 years ago, I switched from iOS to GrapheneOS out of a simple desire to control the technology I used. Out of this desire, I taught myself Android app development, to try and build my own apps, giving birth to Material-Suite: https://github.com/vayun-mathur/Material-Suite. Though I learned a lot doing it, Material-Suite would end up going nowhere, and I switched back to using apps built by others.

My interest in building my own apps was reborn just over a year ago, when I learned about the privacy practices of Life360. Unfortunely for me, at that time, there were no privacy respecting alternatives with the same features. So over the next year, I built one myself: FindFamily (originally here: https://github.com/vayun-mathur/Find-Family). Though it took a lot of time and effort, eventually, I was able to build the first (and to my knowledge only) free and open source, end-to-end-encrypted, cross platform, location sharing app.

Motivated by the success of FindFamily, I started to build more apps (Contacts, OpenAssistant, PDF, and more). After several months of developing these applications independently of each other, I decided to build them together with a consistent design scheme and common components to get back that ecosystem feel that I had back when I was on iOS, so I moved all their code to this repo and the rest is history!