• NewPipe has made my YouTube watching experience way better; it’s a standalone app with features like ad blocking, subscriptions, and downloading.
• F-Droid (particularly the Droid-ify client) is an open-source app store that generally provides quality apps.
• Obtanium has helped me stay up to date with some of my more obscure apps, which are released only on Github. Obtanium can auto-update apps from a GitHub link or similar, which makes the process way easier.
• Auxio is a pretty good music player, it’s quite lightweight but it also looks good.

All of these are available on F-Droid, I find that many F-Droid apps provide a better or cleaner experience than Google Play apps.

FOSS over piracy for sure. While the UI and/or functionality is not often as good as the proprietary option with FOSS apps, I feel a lot more comfortable using them because they are free and you can see what’s going on with them better.