Simple Gallery Pro is an open source photo and video manager built around a single idea: your gallery should read the folders already on your phone and do nothing else. No account, no cloud, no ads. Before you install it, though, there is a fork in the road that most write ups still miss, and it decides which app you should actually be looking at.
Simple Gallery Pro came from Simple Mobile Tools, a suite of minimal open source Android apps. In 2023 that project was sold to a commercial developer. The original author and the community responded by forking the apps under a new name, Fossify, and continuing them independently.
This is the practical consequence: Fossify Gallery is the continuation of what people mean when they recommend Simple Gallery Pro. It is free, open source, and available on F-Droid. If you are installing fresh today, install Fossify Gallery. The rest of this guide describes the app both share, because the interface and behaviour carried over almost unchanged.
It is a folder based gallery. It does not build a separate library or index your photos into a database of its own; it shows the directories on your device as they are. Rename a folder in a file manager and the gallery reflects it. That sounds unremarkable until you have used a gallery that insists on its own organisation.
What is deliberately absent is the point: no advertising, no sign in, no cloud sync, and in the original build no internet permission at all. An Android app without the internet permission cannot transmit anything, because the system gives it no network access to use. That is a structural guarantee rather than a promise in a privacy policy, and it is the strongest single argument for the app.
There are two routes and they cost different amounts.
F-Droid, free. F-Droid is an app store that carries only open source software and builds it from source. Fossify Gallery is there at no cost. This is the route to prefer today.
Play Store, one time purchase. The Pro edition on Google Play is sold outright rather than by subscription. If you want Play Store updates and do not want to add a second app store, this is the trade.
Either way there is no subscription, which is increasingly rare in this category.
The vault is the feature most people arrive for. It hides selected photos from the normal albums and puts them behind a lock.
Be clear on what this is and is not. Hiding marks files so galleries skip them and adds an app level lock. It is not encryption. Anyone with a file manager and physical access to an unlocked phone can still reach the underlying files. It is excellent protection against someone scrolling your gallery on the sofa, and it is not protection against a determined search of the device.
An app with no internet permission cannot back anything up. If your phone is lost or broken, photos that existed only on it are gone. Pair this gallery with a backup you control, whether that is a periodic copy to a computer or a sync tool you have chosen deliberately.
You also give up the cloud era conveniences: no search by face or object, no automatic albums, no shared libraries. That is the trade being made, not an oversight.
Fossify Gallery: the maintained continuation, free and open source. The default recommendation.
Google Photos: the opposite trade. Automatic backup and genuinely strong search, at the cost of your library living on someone else's servers and storage that eventually needs paying for.
Aves Libre: another open source gallery, more feature rich, with good handling of metadata and map views if you want more than the minimal approach.
Your phone's built in gallery: on Samsung and Pixel these are competent. The reason to leave is usually ads, bloat, or wanting a vault the manufacturer does not offer.
Fossify Gallery. Simple Mobile Tools was sold to a commercial developer in 2023, and Fossify is the community continuation of the same apps by the original author. It is free and open source on F-Droid, and the interface is almost unchanged.
Yes. There is no advertising in either the F-Droid build or the paid Play Store edition, and no subscription. The Play version is a single purchase.
Completely. The original build requests no internet permission at all, which means Android gives it no network access even if it wanted one. Everything happens against the folders already on your device.
It is good protection against casual browsing and not against a determined search. Hiding marks files so galleries skip them, and the app lock adds a PIN or fingerprint. The files are not encrypted, so anyone with a file manager and an unlocked phone can still find them.
No, and it cannot. An app without internet permission has no way to upload anything. Use it alongside a backup method you choose yourself, otherwise photos that exist only on the phone are lost with the phone.
Almost always because the folder is hidden or excluded. Check the settings for hidden and excluded folders and for the toggle that shows hidden items. The files have not been deleted, only filtered out of the view.