Enter the platforms through the back door

BarcelonaSocial networks, chats, video and music platforms... and lately AI. Generally, users refer to these as applications because they are mostly used from their mobile phones. But in reality we should call them app services, because they consist of two components: the application with which we consult and interact, and the back-office that does the real work, residing on servers in some remote data center. The providers of these services promote their use through their own applications - often for various devices and operating systems - so that they allow them to capture more information about users. But in many cases, although they do not tell us, this two-component application architecture opens the door to using them with third-party applications, which improve the digital consumer experience and respect privacy more. We review some examples below.

Audiovisual content

The simplest case is accessing content from a platform whose applications are not your own. This often happens with services that also offer access via a web browser. Take YouTube, for example. The application of the undisputed leader in online video is also among the most downloaded, but it has numerous shortcomings for users who are not subscribed: for example, ads between videos and the inability to listen to its content with the phone screen turned off. Fortunately, there are alternative players such as NewPipe and YouTube ReVanced without these drawbacks. You can even import the subscriptions we have on YouTube.

Also linked to YouTube, but rather an alternative to Spotify, Apple Music or Deezer, we find RiMusicThis music player for Android phones takes the habit of many users to search for songs they want to listen to on YouTube to the extreme and now offers the entire YouTube Music catalog. NewPipe, ReVanced and RiMusic all allow you to regain control of what you watch and listen to, avoiding the manipulative algorithms of official applications.

Social networks

When it comes to social networks, the most popular ones tend to be restrictive because a good part of their business consists of sucking users' data to exploit it directly (with personalized ads) or indirectly (selling it to data aggregators). On the contrary, the new open and decentralized platforms are also restrictive in the area of access. Mastodon has an official client application, but there are many more from third parties. I use Elk, which doesn't even need to be downloaded, because it's a web application.

Still in the field of decentralized social networks, we can go up another step and have in a single application the publications of all the users we follow on various platforms, interleaved chronologically and without algorithmic distortions. For example, Openvibe Openvibe is ideal if you haven't yet decided on the aforementioned Mastodon, the fledgling Bluesky, or Meta Threads, but want to see them all or stay active. You can read what your followers are saying, interact with likes and reposts, and post the same thing to all networks simultaneously. Unfortunately, Openvibe can't connect to X accounts. The reason for this is the price Elon Musk's company charges for access to third-party apps; perhaps a paid version of Openvibe that included X would be justified, but for now that's not the case.

Chats

There is also at least one universal inbox for the other big service that takes up a good part of our daily time: messaging. In order to be able to chat with all their contacts, most users believe that they must have WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Google Messages, Slack... applications installed and open them successively or pay attention to the respective notifications. But there is a more efficient way: use BeeperI'm going to you talk here I've been using it for many months now and I still use it every day. You can check and write messages from each network separately or together. You can connect all the networks mentioned and others such as SMS and private messages from X (here yes), LinkedIn and Instagram. I have deleted all the original applications, except Signal and WhatsApp, which must remain present on the phone for technical reasons. In my case, I have the second one confined to an old mobile phone that I only use for that.

Media

A very specific case is digital newspapers. If you agree so much with the editorial line of a medium that you avoid reading any other, its website or mobile application is enough for you. However, we who are sick of information are forced to jump from icon to icon to have a broader view of current events (and when I say sick I think of the more than 100 shortcuts to media and agencies that I had on my phone). An alternative is news aggregators like Google's, but what we see - and what we don't - is subject to the company's algorithms. I am more in favor of using RSS feed readers, a dynamic publication format of content in a simplified format that most serious media continue to offer. By subscribing to the RSS feeds of the media, sections or authors that interest you, an updated list of headlines and an extract of the text is created, which you can click on if you want to go to the original news if you want to expand it. The most popular RSS reader had been Google Reader, but the company closed it and many of us moved to Feedly, which has a free version with basic features but you have to pay if you want searches, automatic sorting or RSS generation on sites that don't have them.

Everything at once

The latest trend is aggregators that combine multiple types of content into a single timeline. With Tapestry, from the creators of Twiterrific, iPhone users can read in one place the posts of users who follow Bluesky, Mastodon, Tumblr and Reddit, but also YouTube channels, podcasts and RSS feeds from blogs and media outlets, in chronological order not manipulated by any algorithm. Other applications that began as RSS readers (Reeder, Unread and Feeeed) are beginning to expand their reach along the same lines as Tapestry, also focused on passive consumption, without the possibility of publishing. In order to do so, we will have to wait for the incipient company to be made public. Surfing.

With this app landscape and some caution - Android versions are rarely on the Play Store, so download only from the respective websites or trusted catalogs like F-Droid - you can make your digital experience more peaceful, efficient, and private.