Tom Cooks

RECCoon: a field recorder you actually own

2026-10-26

Get the app here: https://git.tomcooks.com/reccoon/tree/releases, or on F-Droid here https://f-droid.org/packages/com.tomcooks.reccoon/.

My friend Alberto asked me if i knew of any Android app that could record uncompressed WAV files, without being unnecessary complicated; i decided to build it myself, and add extra functionalities on top that are useful for my own creative endevours.

So RECCoon is a minimalist, offline field recorder for Android. One big button, a waveform, two peak meters, and a WAV that is exactly what the microphone heard.

What it records

For the field the point is simple: the WAV is the master. No transcoding, no resampling, no “export” step, no surprise header. You stop, you get a file, you copy it out. Airplane mode is fine. There is no account and nothing leaves the phone.

Transcription, on device

The feature I actually use the most is offline transcription. sherpa-onnx runs NVIDIA Parakeet v3 (int8, 25 languages) locally. The ~670 MB model is downloaded once, from a pinned Hugging Face revision, and after that the phone never needs the network again. Silero VAD cuts the recording into speech chunks, the transcript comes back with timestamps, tapping a word seeks the player to it, and you can export .txt or .srt.

No cloud. No “send your voice to our servers”. It is slower than a datacenter and it is not perfect, but it is yours.

Free software

RECCoon is GPL-3.0-or-later. Source: https://git.tomcooks.com/reccoon.

You can find the APK on the git repository https://git.tomcooks.com/reccoon/tree/releases and on F-Droid https://f-droid.org/packages/com.tomcooks.reccoon/.

Keep Android Open

All of this — F-Droid, sideloading, an APK you can rebuild and check — is about to get much harder. In August 2025 Google announced that from 2027 every Android developer will have to register centrally with Google before their app can be installed on any device. Not just Play Store apps: every app, including F-Droid apps and things you build for yourself. Registration means a fee, Google’s terms, a government ID, evidence of your signing key, and a list of every app ID you will ever ship. If you do not comply, your app is silently blocked on every Android device in the world.

That is not a security feature. Play Protect already scans for malware; requiring a government ID does not make code safer, it makes developers identifiable and controllable. It is a gatekeeping and censorship tool, and it would end anonymous open-source contribution on Android — the thing that made Android different from the iPhone in the first place.

The Keep Android Open campaign is the pushback: over 100,000 signatories and 71 organisations from 23 countries, including the FSFE. It matters because a hobbyist recorder for twelve people is exactly the kind of software that disappears first: no company, no legal department, no credit card for Google’s fee. I would not hand GitLab my identity just to run a CI job; I am certainly not going to hand it to Google for the right to install a recorder on my own phone.

Built with AI

RECCoon was built with AI. From the first line to the F-Droid merge it took 30 days and about $2.70 in model costs.

The interesting part is not the price; it is where the time went. The AI did the parts I would otherwise postpone forever: Gradle plumbing, the RIFF header rewrite, the foreground-service permissions, the sherpa-onnx bindings, the F-Droid metadata, and the reproducibility yak-shaving. I did the part that actually matters: deciding what the app should do, and saying no to the rest.

Why this is good for open source

David Heinemeier Hansson (the Rails guy) made the case on Lex Fridman’s podcast #501 that AI is good for open source. His point is that the “everyone can contribute” promise of open source was never really true — it was always a small caste of highly skilled wizards — and agents change that:

This is what we proclaimed for so long was going to be the magic of open source, that we could all contribute to it, but it was, of course, never true. There was only a small subset of people who contribute to open source, and that was the very highly skilled wizards. So this is a bit of a reformation moment.

All the drudgery of replicating and managing open source projects is evaporating at lightning speed, and we are left with the golden juicy parts […] deciding what should this thing do and where should it go?

More people can build more open source software, because the boring 80% — packaging, metadata, reproducible-build yak-shaving — is exactly what used to kill small, useful, niche projects. When that cost collapses, the scarce resource becomes taste and attention, not typing. A single person can ship and maintain a recorder for the twelve people who need uncompressed WAV in the field, and still have a weekend left.

Try it

It is 1.0.0, arm64 only for now, and it will have rough edges. If you record in the field — or just want a file you actually own — I would like to hear what breaks.