Arc Search (discontinued)★★★★☆Surprisingly, I like the mobile Arc browser better than its desktop counterpart. Simplified UI, stays mostly out of your way, and it’s satisfying to fling tabs offscreen to close them. Still leery of the AI summarizer, though.
Assistant for No Man’s Sky★★★★★Very useful for looking up crafting recipes and other reference while playing the game on my PC. Updated quickly when the game adds new features.
Bookshop.org★★★★☆A good place to shop online for books and still support indie bookstores. They sell eBooks too, in standard ePub format.
Deedum★★★☆☆A full featured, if awkward, Gemini client for Android and iOS. Handles bookmarks, subscriptions and client identities.
DuckDuckGo★★★★☆A private-ish search engine that’s also serving less slop than Google. Disposable email aliases are convenient. The browser extension and standalone browser block known trackers, and the Android app can block trackers in other apps too.
eBooks.com★★★★☆An eBook seller with some actual business ethics. No hardware (which simplifies things), but they have an app for Android and iOS, and any DRM-free titles can be downloaded and read on just about anything.
Ecosia (Search)★★★☆☆Non-profit search provider that uses renewable energy and partners with environmental organizations. AKA “the search engine that plants trees.”
FreeOTP (Authenticator)★★★☆☆Extremely bare-bones 2FA app for iOS and Android, sponsored by Red Hat. It’s secure, works offline, and doesn’t depend on Google. A decent choice if you start with it, but a lack of import features means switching from another app is tedious.
iNaturalist★★★★★A citizen science project for reporting and identifying wildlife observations, plus a phone app for use ‘in the field.’ Think of it as Pokémon Go for real animals and plants.
Kobo (eBook store and readers)★★★★☆A solid alternative to Kindle, from the eBook selection through apps and hardware. The app works well on my eink tablet without too much tweaking, though it still wants to sell me more books before I can open the one I want to read.
Lagrange★★★★★Lagrange quickly became my favorite Gemini client on the desktop with its clean and convenient UI, stability and speed across platforms. And the mobile version works well too.
Manyverse★★★★☆Takes the pain out of setting up and running SSB. Unfortunately it doesn’t overcome SSB’s inherent challenges of discovery, data size or multiple devices. (So far?)
Mastodon (Mobile App)★★★☆☆Good for someone new to Mastodon, but lacks advanced features found in other apps like Tusky.
NetNewsWire★★★★★Clean, stable, fast, free, no-clutter and no-nonsense RSS/Atom newsfeed reader for macOS and iOS.
OpenVibe★★★☆☆A cool idea, and it looks great, but the combined feed is too much of a firehose unless you’re only following a small number of people on each account.
Orion Browser★★★★★A Mac-native WebKit browser from Kagi that’s more advanced than Safari, slightly cleaner than Arc or Zen, and can run Chromium/Firefox extensions. I may be sticking with this as my main web browser on macOS.
Pocket (discontinued)★★★☆☆I used Pocket for ages to better manage my time reading articles. Eventually I soured on the way it’s turned into a recommendation engine. And now Mozilla’s discontinuing it. Wallabag is a decent alternative for the read-it-later aspect.
Safari (Web Browser)★★★★☆Dependable web browser built into macOS. Not much in the way of bells and whistles, but it does offer the usual bookmarks, autofill, reading mode, private windows, etc. And it’ll install PWAs on a desktop.
Vivaldi (Web Browser)★★★★★Spiritual successor to the original Opera browser, this ultra-customizable web browser can open into a full suite for email, calendar, feeds and more – but only if you want it to.
Wallabag★★★★☆A read-it-later type service built on open-source software that you can run yourself if you want (but don’t have to). Not as polished as Pocket, but it’s sticking around, and you know it’s not using your saved bookmarks to train a recommendation engine.
Watch Duty★★★★★More useful than official alerts or the LA Times fire maps for knowing which parts of a wildfire you need to worry about and how soon.