Google is somehow the only company that is able to completely ruin a calculator app. Even before installing, Google outs themselves with how much data they collect:
- App info and performance: Crash logs and Diagnostics
- Personal info: Email address
- Device or other IDs
- App activity: App interactions
And of course the encouraging message:
Data can’t be deleted
The developer doesn’t provide a way for you to request that your data be deleted
As soon as you try to install it, the app requests network access. I’m glad to be using GrapheneOS where this can be restricted.
The app doesn’t crash on launch, which is a new concept for Google, since most of their apps won’t even start without Google Play Services installed. Maybe that means the calculator app can calculate 1+1 without requiring installing the most invasive software known to man, right?
Of course it can’t. It crashes the moment you press the plus sign. Thank you, Google, for requiring Google Play Services for your calculator app to do basic addition. You know what calculator doesn’t require Google Play services to do math?
In all seriousness, OpenCalc is a near 1:1 match to Google Calculator, so I suggest anyone use that instead.
The cherry on top is Google’s calculator app is bundled with a privacy policy, which on its own is a treat to read through: https://policies.google.com/privacy
Congratulations, Google, you can spy on math now.
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
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Why does a calculator need my fucking email address? We’re not pen pals, just do this arithmetic.
Not big fans of the GDRP I assume 😂
Thanks I’ve uninstalled Google’s calculator and installed OpenCalc
Funnily enough, calculator is one of the few proprietary apps I’ve paid for and still happily lose. Wolfram alpha just does many things that other calculators don’t.
They need to spy on math. To see if the User is stupid enough to fall for scam ads, or is a math student which cant fall for numbers.
On the cli my favorite calculator of all time is Qalc. It’s fucking amazing.
You can be like “1 km to mi” and it will give it to you.
For some reason the screenshots show the gui but imo the cli is where it’s at
https://qalculate.github.io/
https://github.com/Qalculate/libqalculate
2 plus 2 is 4 minus 1. That’s 3. Quick maths.
How many lights do you see?
Also nice GeoGebra, OpenSource from Austria (EU), online, Android, iPhone
Not FOSS but great, OmniCalculator from Poland (EU), online, free, a collection of 3718 calculators for every task.
GeoGebra! Our school used it for demonstration on the lessons and had us do homework in there! Have good memories of it.
I use this one. It isn’t FOSS, but it’s a one-time purchase to remove ads. It has a lot of added features, like algebra and unit conversions, and requires no permissions.
The last time I wanted to do something for privacy, someone laughed at me saying “They don’t want to make a google mail because google spies on us”. Eh I wish you could read all this shit but you’re old and you don’t care about privacy ig
I don’t understand. If I am using Android already, how does calculator make privacy worse? Calculations are not exactly revealing.
And if I am using graphene, why would I consider using any Google app?
Graphene is basically android too. If you install lineage without gapps for example, I think you’ll have great privacy. About the second, I don’t know…
Lineage or Graphene, yes?
I just bought a second Pixel 4a and can therefore now afford the slight bricking risk to install Graphene or Lineage.
Lineage and grpahene do different things. Research and find the right for yourself. And instead of lineage you could find a crdroid on if you for example want more customization
I mean, there are a gazilion of calculator apps around?
I have a good experience With CalcYou.
I’ve personally found the behavior of ‘clear’, spacing of buttons, and lack of customization capable of fixing those to be rather annoying. They’re the same complaints I have with Fossify’s calculator app. I’m currently using OpenCalc since they don’t have those issues.
You mean the margins between the rounded buttons?
rofi-calcis awesome. It’s so convenient to just press a keyboard shortcut you have defined and instantly being able to type or paste your equation, no having to wait for a complicated GUI to load, no clicking required. You can just pop it in whenever you need. Also it does unit conversions, instead of a math equation you can just type10 inches to cmor10 eur to usdor100 celsius to fahrenheitor100 to binarywhich is a huge time saver.https://github.com/svenstaro/rofi-calc
Besides, it’s rofi and rofi rules 😎
I didn’t know about this! I already use rofi for a few different things, so I’m going to get rofi-calc working too, it’ll fit perfectly into my workflow. Thanks!
There’s so many cool rofi plugins 🤩
Rofi is cool but don’t forget about qalculate (the backend)
Yeah I should have mentioned it, the day I stumbled on rofi-calc and learned that it could deal with natural language thanks to qalculate I was floored ! I don’t know who came up with the idea by hat off to them
wow, great program! I’ve been using bc for some simple calculations before, but this just replaced it!
Desmos scientific calculator isn’t open source but it is what I end up using most of the time. It just does float stuff though, it can’t handle something like (10100+1)-10100
It also doesn’t support nearly as many features as the graphing calculator does, for some reason. But it formats everything very nicely and you can copy and paste as latex