Best Open Source Android Apps are great for sharpening your programming skills. They are a valuable resource that can help you become a great developer. You can examine and explore open source apps code and build better apps on top of these projects and launch your own applications.
You can watch courses or read books, blogs, forums, and documentation to learn to programme considerably, but there is no alternative to reading a well documented, fully-functional and well-tested app along with its external resources to master the art of programming.
Here is the list of best open source Android apps that are mostly written in Java from various categories to help you become a professional Android Developer. These apps are also available on the Google Play Store and you can use them before diving right into the code. We have attached the difficulty level, GitHub and Play Store link with each app in the list.
Table of Contents
Amaze File Manager
Amaze File Manager is a Material design file manager for Android.
A file manager is an extremely common app that is natively available on almost all Android devices. You can learn how to build a file manager by reading and examining the Amaze File Manager code. It will teach you how to how to perform file handling across all Android platforms and how to perform basic operations such as create, cut, copy, delete, rename, compress, extract, and encrypt files and folders efficiently.
GitHub: 2070 stars and 730 forks
Play Store: 500,000+ Downloads and 4.3/5.0 Rating
Difficulty: Intermediate
Orbot: Proxy with Tor
Orbot is a free Proxy app that allows other internet apps to use the internet safely without being monitored.
It is very similar to Tor Browser and in fact, it uses Tor to encrypt internet traffic. It then routes this through a series of computers. It has a built-in VPN and any app can use it. It is also the official version of Tor for Android devices. It is designed to protect your security and allow you to be anonymous. They use state of the art of protocols for security. You can use Orfox web browser which is built upon the source code of Tor with Orbot proxy to hide your privacy.
GitHub: 284 stars and 123 forks
Play Store: 10,000,000+ Downloads and 4.3/5.0 Rating
Difficulty: Advanced
Minimal ToDo
Minimal ToDo is a material app with minimal features to make it useful.
It is a very simple project that will teach you some of the basic stuff about Android Development. I recommend going through this project if you are a beginner. You will learn about fragments and how to design a decent app.
GitHub: 1458 stars and 625 forks
Play Store: 10,000+ Downloads and 4.5/5.0 Rating
Difficulty: Beginner
Omni Notes
Omni notes is an open source note-taking application for Android.
Omni notes is a big project that has all sorts of note-taking app features. You can add, modify, archive, trash and delete notes. You can share them and search them using full-text search available. Tags and Categories, as well as sketch-note mode, is also available. If you are looking for Google Now integration, you can check out this project because it comes up with its implementation. All in all, it is a big project with a lot of features.
GitHub: 1547 stars and 648 forks
Play Store: 100,000+ Downloads and 4.4/5.0 Rating
Difficulty: Intermediate
2048
The Android port of the 2048 game for offline playing.
It’s just a web view that loads the HTML files that are stored locally. The code is not too great but you can learn how to use assets and create a very simple game.
GitHub: 703 stars and 626 forks
Play Store: 1,000,000+ Downloads and 4.2/5.0 Rating
Difficulty: Beginner
VLC
VLC Media player Official App for Android.
VLC is a popular and open source media player used by a large number of people and organizations. It is a very big project with a large number of components. You need to be an advanced professional programmer to understand and examine this project.
GitHub: 4043 stars and 1574 forks
Play Store: 100,000,000+ Downloads and 4.4/5.0 Rating
Difficulty: Advanced
LeafPic
LeafPic is an ad-free, open-source and material-designed android gallery alternative.
LeafPic is one of the best photo and video gallery application from hundreds of others on the Play Store. It is fluid, material design, and open source available under GPL license v3. You can examine LeafPic’s code to understand how to create a gallery application. This app also offers dynamic theming, image crop and many other features that will help you become a better Android developer.
GitHub: 2580 stars and 1043 forks
Play Store: 50,000+ Downloads
Difficulty: Intermediate
Google I/O 2018
The Official Google I/O 2018 conference app to navigate the conference.
Google I/O is a simple beautifully designed app. Its source code was released after the I/O. With this app, you can explore the conference schedule, save events, get reminders, and much more. This app is written in Kotlin. You can dive into the code and learn how to design a great project. This app is well designed and since this app is developed by Google, you can expect the code quality and design to be great.
GitHub: 17,163 stars and 5,578 forks
Play Store: 500,000+ Downloads and 4.3/5.0 Rating
Difficulty: Intermediate
Easy Sound Recorder
Easy-sound-recorder is a simple sound recording app that uses Material Design Guidelines.
It is a simple sound recorder app that can help you learn how to work with audio recording in Android. It is a beginner level project that you can use to understand how to create a basic app that implements Material Design along with TabLayout and using CRUD with the filesystem.
GitHub: 874 stars and 491 forks
Play Store: 10,000+ Downloads and 4.2/5.0 Rating
Difficulty: Beginner
DuckDuckGo
DuckDuckGo Privacy Browser that makes privacy simplified.
DuckDuckGo is a search engine that focuses on protecting user privacy and avoiding personalized search results. The Android app source code is quite complex and large. This app uses Kotlin and C++. You can dive into this app’s code and learn how to create a fully working and well tested commercial application.
GitHub: 544 stars and 148 forks
Play Store: 1,000,000+ Downloads and 4.4/5.0 Rating
Difficulty: Advanced
