Simple Mobile Tools was a collection of basic, free, open source apps for Android devices, including a file manager, calendar, and photo gallery. The apps were popular alternatives to paid apps and services, but the developer recently sold the app suite to ZipApps, which then proceeded to destroy the apps with subscriptions and ads. The Fossify project has picked up where Simple Mobile Tools left off, so you can continue using a great suite of apps on your phone or tablet.
A developer working on Simple Mobile Tools was able to separate the projects before the acquisition was completed, thus starting the Fossify project. Now the apps are launched on F-Droid and Google Play Store. You can consider Fossify apps as the spiritual successors of Simple Mobile Tools. There’s a file manager, a contacts app, a phone app, a calendar app, a gallery app, an SMS app, a music player for your locally downloaded music, and a voice recorder.
The new Fossify package offers all the same features as the original Simple Mobile Tools line, except without a paywall and without ads. Also, they are open source. Since SMT apps are going in a different direction under new ownership, this is only meant to fill the place these apps previously occupied—free, no-frills apps that do the job very well.
These apps are pretty decent replacements for some of your phone’s stock apps. If you don’t like how a particular app works or looks, or if it has too much bloatware (or worse, ads), these Fossify apps will take over and do what these other apps did. Furthermore, they don’t ask you for weird, blanket permissions or anything like that. If we could complain about them, it would probably be that they have an extremely simple interface (some apps also look quite dated), but you could also say that this is a feature rather than a drawback.
You can download Fossify apps from the Google Play Store, and all of them are free to download. They are also available on the F-Droid store, and the source code is available on GitHub.
Source: Liliputing