AI frees bloated proprietary apps

I wrote about personal apps earlier this year, and I continue creating smaller utilities that I always wanted to have, but never had enough time or desire to actually write by hand.

But I’ve recently seen an influx of free open-source apps replacing first party vendor apps. Well, we’ve seen the same story before with alternative Twitter and Reddit clients, for example. I wonder how it turns out this time.

DJI cameras

Handheld and action DJI cameras are very popular (the newest models are sold out everywhere!). But their official app offer a miserable experience. Bloated with ads, slow, and with minimal features.

So, there are two open source alternatives: Osmosis – a media downloader, and OpenPocketCine – a field monitor, which I tried. It is fast and slick.

Logitech keyboards and mice

Another well-known example of overcomplicated and unnecessary heavy software is the Logitech companion app. It never worth it to me to install this app to remap one or two buttons on my mouse.

Welcome, OpenLogi, which does the same with a lightweight (and better, at least for me) UI.

Spotify

The original Spotify app is just a wrapper around a complex browser page. There have been many attempts to rebuild it with various UI frameworks, but they rarely were feature complete.

Now, there is Faspotify, that not only rebuilds UI in Rust, but also claims to use much less memory and work much faster. I haven’t used it because it is not yet notarized for macOS, but I’m going to give it a try as soon as it is available.

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What these all apps have in common? I’d claim that they all are largely written with LLMs. And it is not an offense. 3 out of 4 don’t even hide Claude from co-authors.

If any tech helps users to get better apps for the services they use, or physical products they bought, we all win.

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