To me it seems to be a bit more active than it used to be. Even my unpopular ultra budget Redmi from 4 years ago got a couple of A14 roms this year.
I don't know why but Aves is slow on my phone. I noticed terrible UI stuttering and lags while opening photos. It also looks ugly to me.
MixPlorer is still one of the best filemanagers
Nova Launcher is still one of the best launchers.
There are tons of great music player apps on github and fdroid like Gramophone, Auxio, Metro Music, etc.
Revanced Manager is an app to patch different kinds of apps for different purposes like Patch twitch app to remove ads. There is a No root option or you can patch them on your PC.
XManager for spotify.
ColorBlendr is the best app to tweak Android's Monet theming.
Clipious is a great yt app alternative. It has filters to not show videos or channels with certain titles.
Browsers:
-
There are a few Chromium browsers that have extension support now, Kiwi is the most popular. Microsoft Edge is also adding extensions but it's available on the unstable Canary builds for now.
-
Firefox supports a limited selection of extensions now. Some firefox based browsers like Iceraven have a larger list and also an option to sideload any extension.
-
FFUpdater is a useful app to check out all the firefox related browsers and to download and update them.
DraStic Emulator is free now.
Wavelet is a great Equalizer app.
Weather Timeline is dead 😭 but Today Weather is a great alternative. There are some good weather apps on fdroid and GitHub like Hello Weather, Breezy, Clima, etc.
Fossify Gallery is a great opensource photo and video library app.
Bitwarden is the best password manager.
Proton and Fossify have some great privacy focused apps.
WallYou Plus is a good wallpaper app.
Notesnook (Not completely free), Joplin (ugly), Siyuan (New) are some opensource Evernote alternatives. Amplenote, Upnote are some non opensource ones.
Some apps have an option to enable "Dynamic theme" or "Monet theme" or "Material You". That tells them to match the theme colours of your system. Everytime you change the colours of your OS they are also automatically changed to match them.
Latest beta release was on April 3. Source from telegram.