Looks like you may have made a decision already, but wanted to give Polaris a mention. Been using that on my home server, has a nice Web-UI and a mobile app on F-Droid as well.

https://github.com/agersant/polaris

But it’s not cheese, so obviously you can’t enter it in a cheese contest.

Except you can and vegetarian and vegan substitutes are explicitly allowed by the competition in question.

See subcategories towards the bottom of this page: https://goodfoodfdn.org/awards/categories/cheese/

It sounds more like they just never thought a vegan cheese would come close to winning. And when that happened, they planned to make a co-winner, if a vegan cheese was crowned first place. https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2024/04/27/vegan-cheese-good-food-awards-climax/

Except the would be winner was disqualified, not for being vegan, but for using an ingredient, “kokum butter”, which has not been categorized by authorities as Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) yet.

Kokum, for those wondering, is in the mangosteen family (Garcinia) and the fruit is often used as a souring agent in South Asian cooking. The fat from the seed, like cocoa butter, is used in cosmetics but is also edible and has culinary applications.

I get that “rules are rules” and an ingredient was used that wasn’t approved… But based on the activities like having a co-winner, leading up to the disqualification makes me think it’s not the fact that it’s vegan that’s a problem, it’s the threat and validation that a plant-based product could be great or better than its dairy equivalent.

I noticed I only got the rate limiting error when searching for an app on Aurora, but not to download and install. But how to get to the install page if you can’t search?

I opened Firefox/Fennec on mobile, searched for an app, clicked the result for the Google Play store. Once on the play store page for the app was open, I would choose the “Open in App” option from the Firefox menu and select Aurora.

That would launch Aurora and bring me directly to the App Install page. From there I could complete the installation.

This was sometime in 2023, but hopefully it will still be helpful today.

I’ve used Language Transfer with good success. Don’t even need to sign up, you can just go, click on a course and start streaming lessons. You can also download them locally.

https://www.languagetransfer.org/free-courses-1

The idea is to create rules that help you “transfer” words from the source language into the target language, hence, “Language Transfer”.

For example, going from English to Spanish: Words in English that end in ation, will end in acion in Spanish.

Confirmation -> Confirmación Conversation -> Conversación

Further, words following this rule are “ar” verbs. Confirmation -> Confirmación -> confirmar

Another one is words ending in al, which came to Spanish and English via Arabic… are the same. Just said with an accent.

Normal -> Normal Formal -> Formal

A few rules might get you a few hundred words. And while some words might be more formal that how something is typically said, you should still be understood.

They’re completely donation based, ad-free, and no sign-up required.