Gopher Apps on Android

As I’ve been ahem digging into Gopherspace this past month, I of course wanted to see how I could get there from my phone. I already had Lagrange for the Gemini protocol, and Lagrange handles Gopher in a Gemini client better than Netscape ever did in a web browser. But there had to be some dedicated Gopher clients for Android, right?

As it turns out, there are some…but not many. Worse: most of what I found was incomplete, awkward to use, or no longer compatible with modern Android…or some combination of the three.

The Play Store only has one Gopher client I could find, though there are a bunch of apps with “gopher” in their names. DiggieDog looks nice, but has some weird quirks that make it hard to recommend unless you just want something that works without going outside the main app store.

F-Droid has DeBurrow, which also looks nice, but has a different set of weird quirks that make it hard to recommend. There are two more outdated apps in F-Droid’s archives: Pocket Gopher can’t even install on anything newer than Android 13, and the Gophercle project files aren’t even online anymore. Both are missing key capabilities like accepting gopher links from other apps.

My initial forays from the desktop had brought me to Floodgap with its gopher proxy and the Overbite project. (Overbite has a nice article on what makes Gopher still relevant.) But the Overbite Android app never got past proof of concept. I tried it out, and it works, but it’s not really complete. So again, I can’t really recommend it.

So for now I’m back to Lagrange, which does have decent support for Gopher. It displays plain text already, and converts menus internally into Gemtext. And of course it supports Gemini and several other small-net protocols, and it’s much better polished and usable in general.