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.

  • amanneedsamaidEnglish
    2·
    3 days ago

    I use fossify dialer, not familiar with Drupe, but works well for me.

    • millie@beehaw.orgOPEnglish
      2·
      3 days ago

      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.

      • amanneedsamaidEnglish
        2·
        2 days ago

        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.