• pwalker
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    1 year ago

    Weawow is a completly (also ad-)free weather forecast app run basically solo by a Japanese guy. I was surprised when I found this app that it was so good in every aspect that I had to donate the guy. It has has more than half a Mio. reviews on google play with an average of 4.9 . Idk of any free app with that many reviews having this kind of rating, well deserved.

    Further honorable mentions:

    • Vivaldi browser
    • Joplin notes app
    • nextcloud
    • wikipedia (obviously)
    • Öffi
    • Signal
    • keepass
    • rif for reddit (R.I.P)
    • mrmhm@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Just downloaded Weawow - one of the more impressive things for me is that it’s only 144kb.

    • yourdogsnipples@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I love weawow! Agreed about making a regular donation to the Weawow dev… or it’ll face the curse of other top, rated free apps - the developer has tons of users, dealing with all their support requests, and can’t make a living from it, then rightly sells up to some sh!tty company who then turns the app to shite. Yes, that’s the story of the legendary Quickpic app.

      • pwalker
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        1 year ago

        yeah you can see all donation transparently on the donations section (unless u opted for anonymous) and fortunately it’s looking like it’s going quite well. I assume the creator actually has some more employees now or at least professional help for all the translations of the app as it seems to be available in a lot of languages.

      • pwalker
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        1 year ago

        I don’t think thats true, Vivaldi is more like Chromium is you want to do that comparison. Well anyway they are way different thant the google user profile tracking you get with all the google servies. They mostly makeoney with partner deals in pre-set bookmarks and search engines. They explicitly say they don’t collecr user data: https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-business-model/

        But yeah I get your point. They are still not a “non-profit” like the signal foundation or wiki etc. Still the whole company and the team behind them relies om a lot of work by voluntaries im they forums an big collection and I totally would pay for Vivaldi or donate for them if they ever want to change their business model to become donation driven.