I didn’t want to make two separate posts for these, so I am combining them into one. The two hardest apps to find for Android were a music player capable of playing local files, and an ebook reader with a nice design. With some help from the community, I was able to find nice apps for both of those. All apps here are available to install via Obtainium. My goal here is to raise awareness for some unknown but high quality apps that I have found.
Music player: VLC
Credit: @[email protected], @[email protected], @[email protected]
I have tried plenty of music players, and most of them are either copies of each other, are lacking in features, or are just plain buggy. Despite what I expected, VLC is actually the best choice in this category.
Besides being a must-have in general, VLC actually has fantastic support for music management. It has plenty of customization, however I found that the Black theme did not work. Besides that, it has support for folders, creating playlists, playback history, albums, artists, genres, shuffling, queue management, equalizers, sleep timers, playback speed, A-B repeat, and so much more. It is honestly exactly what I was looking for, with a sleek UI and very feature packed. It’s nothing like the desktop app.
eBook reader: Book’s Story
It was a struggle to find an eBook reader with nice usability. I managed to find two that are very promising. One such reader is Book’s Story.
Book’s Story offers a completely offline experience to managing and reading eBooks. It’s what I would want if I were to code an eBook reader, with a nice Material design and a minimalistic layout. However, there are things I don’t like about it. For starters, it doesn’t correctly read my eBooks. That’s honestly disappointing, since that means the app is currently dysfunctional, but I am including it in this list because I have high hopes for it. There is also no page turning view, which isn’t bad, but it’s a feature I look forward to. Overall, I don’t currently recommend using this, but in the future I can easily see it becoming one of the best eBook readers out there.
eBook reader: Myne
Unlike Book’s Story, Myne is able to read all of my eBooks just fine. Myne is an even more polished eBook reader, also with support for downloading eBooks from the internet in the app.
It too lacks in a page turning view, and doesn’t allow you to customize which screen is your default. The second one is slightly annoying because if you are offline and open the app the first thing you see is a 404 page. You can still view your offline ebooks, of course, but it would be nice to select which page is the default. Furthermore, while it was able to read my eBooks well enough, there are still a few minor HTML artifacts visible in the book. If I was able to merge the layout of Book’s Story with the design and functionality of Myne, it would become the perfect eBook reader.
I’d love to see where both of these projects go, and even in their current state they beat some of the most popular eBook readers in my opinion, such as Librera and KOReader.
I used to use VLC for music, but these days I use Symphony to play local files on my phone. VLC tended to struggle when scanning or indexing large folders (which it did all the time…), while Symphony is a bit better at that. That said, I still use VLC for video and for casting things from my DLNA server (VLC supports Chromecast).
For ebooks, I’ve used Librera FD and that has been mostly OK. I’ll checkout the two you mentioned though. Thanks!
Your link for Myne is a fork that hasn’t been updated in a long time. I haven’t used it but you might want to check you were using the right version
Ah, that is unfortunate. I put the wrong link. Thank you!
They don’t seem to accept books in .pdf form, any solution?
For PDFs I simply use GrapheneOS’s PDF reader, I don’t have any other recommendations in terms of other PDF readers.
I currently started using Moon+ Reader, which is proprietary, simply because I could not find any good open source alternative that matches the quality. It might be able to handle PDFs.
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I was a die hard VLC user but now I can’t live without MPV.
VLC does work great on Windows, but I had some issues on Linux & Android, solved by MPV. One simple example is with jellyfin on android. VLC as an external player sometimes doesn’t work great with ASS subtitles. VLC fell a bit behind on Linux/Android devices.
However on Windows, VLC would have been the first thing I would install alongside with Firefox.
Both of these are on f-droid
My favorite e-reader is Cool Reader(granted, it was last updated 3 years ago)
My favorite music player is innerTune (however that is more for playing YouTube vids as music)
InnerTune is also a YouTube Music frontend. Dunno what trick they use but having a similar experience (even better?) than YouTube Music for free is a godsend !
Damn I didn’t know VLC was on android lol, definitely my desktop go-to!
If you’re into selfhosting komga is a great alternative eBook, epub reader. Their native web reader is great and works flawlessly and your reading is synced on your server, so you can finish off where ever you’re ! (Yeah you need to be online sorry :/)
Though there isn’t a native reader for offline reading, you can install mihon and the komga plugin to fetch your server’s PDF files (doesn’t work with epubs). However, mihon only syncs your finished chapters.
That’s why I recommend to read with komga’s PWA as it works great and syncs on what page you finished off.
