Karui is a lightweight (84KB) to-do list android app with a Unix-inspired aesthetic, using AlpineJS. My goal was simple: create a privacy-friendly app that isn't bloated with too many dependencies, or unnecessary complexity, make it as light as possible while it still fits my usecase, have a terminal-esque design so it stands out from others, and add tons of themes so that you can waste time changing themes of your todolist as much as you do changing themes of your code editor.

The project started as I tried polishing a really old android app from android 4.4.2 which had its code on Github under GPLv3 license. But the app just wont build. I walked into some forums with questions, got rejected from some (the question was listed as too niche), but in the end the app won't build. Still it was an interesting observation. Even if the source is available, if you can't run it without closed-source dependencies, is it really free?

But it was a gateway to looking into how to make a truly free software for android. In most android projects on GitHub there are proprietary dependencies like analytics scripts, or reliance on Google's Play Store APIs, and even encrypted blocks that can only be read by Google, which gets them a non-free or Anti-Features tags even if they make it to f-droid, which is of particular interest to me as I am looking into a qr library to share and save notes data between devices. This ensures your notes never have to connect to the internet.

But nevertheless the AlpineJs route felt the best for this app, its unlikely that the support for webview will go away at any point, and refactoring the code slightly to fit the future changes would just be a breeze, atleast that's what I hope. I considered native approache with Jetpack Compose, but it didn’t align with Karui’s minimalism-first philosophy. The app’s focus is on simplicity, reproducibility, and long-term support—WebView ensures future-proofing without locking into Google’s UI frameworks.