For years I was using Drupe, but they’ve thoroughly enshittified. What used to be a sleek, extremely functional dialer app with a fantastic UI has become a slow, ad-filled sack of garbage with a still pretty good UI.
A few months back I had enough and I switched to FOSS Dialer. The biggest thing on my radar was looking for something that isn’t prone to being turned to adware garbage for a quick quarterly profit, so it seemed like a good fit.
But in the past few months I’ve probably made more accidental calls in a single week than in the years that I used Drupe. It’s super obnoxious. Click once, and I call some random person. When I open my phone it literally just starts at the top of my contact list.
Drupe was great because I could arrange which frequent numbers I wanted to use in which order along the left side of my screen and calling or texting just required me to drag it over to a spot on the right side of my screen. I could call people without looking at my phone, I hardly ever called the wrong number or accidentally dialed someone, and it was really comfortable and easy to use. If it hadn’t turned to a bloated piece of crap I’d have used it forever.
So my question: is there anything more along the lines of Drupe in terms of UI that is at least not at the moment packed full of ads, slow as hell, and collecting all sorts of data? I’ve kinda had it up to here with FOSS Dialer.
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Google dialer?
Ad free, not slow, but collecting all possible data on your calls.
I like that it’s blocking the spam calls, I get 10 spam calls for each real call. Unfortunately that needs to send back to them all my phone calls with their caller id.
I hate how it shows the call log. It only shows the latest action ever for a number and doesn’t even show the time. This is especially infuriating when you need to see what time someone called. For example my doctor office called to move my appointment, then when I showed up they said that wasn’t true and wanted to charged me for a no-show. I wasn’t able to prove immediately that they called me on which day and at which time to move the appointment because the “simplified” call log only shows the latest call action which was that I called back several days after that.
Nah, I’m good.
In general; I strongly don’t recommend anything on the Google Play Store except the Google Dialer.
If the Google Dialer is not to your liking; I strongly recommend only trying Dialers you will find on F-Droid.org
I use fossify dialer, not familiar with Drupe, but works well for me.
I described the primary feature I’m looking for: a way to make calls based on a motion more complex than just clicking a name, and preferably one I can do without looking at the screen.
Gestures would work.
My bad, v tired when I replied. That is an interesting feature the only similar solution I can think of is using something like Fossify Dialer (a fork of the now ad-ridden and proprietary Simple Dialer) and use T9 dialing. That could achieve a similar speed / memorization as a gesture.
You could definitely get good enough at T9 to at least call people without looking at the screen.
Emerald Dialer is FOSS
Just tried it and really enjoyed, but the contact sources just don’t seem to work? Two options, one from sms and one from com.android.contacts, and neither are correct (missing / duplicate contacts). Confused as to why the dialer can’t just pull from my contacts like every other dialer, or I’d probably switch!
FOSS is honestly a secondary concern to not constantly dialing random numbers every time I brush up against my phone.
