If you are subscribed to the AM Debug channel on Telegram (which, for some reason, has become a channel where I post regular updates regarding App Manager and things that may affect its development), you may have already noticed that I was pursuing a Ph.D. or M.S. in Computer Science this year. I shall not go into the details, but I shall make an effort to give you an outline of what I was doing since October 2023.
| Timeline | |
|---|---|
| October | Created an academic profile and a curriculum vitae (CV) |
| October - December | Sent emails to professors asking for possible research opportunities as a Ph.D. student in their labs |
| November | Sat for the TOEFL (language) exam |
| December - January | Applied to the selected universities from where I received a strongly positive response and which have a priority deadline for the Fall’24 application |
| January - March | Started getting offers or rejections from the universities |
| April | Decided a university, received I-20, and applied for a US visa |
| May | Faced a visa interview, had my visa issued, and bought a plane ticket |
| May - July | Looked for accommodation, managed to find an on-campus apartment |
| August | Did some shopping, registered for courses |
| September | Flew to the US, and classes were started. |
Although the outline may look very simple, the reality was that most of the steps involved a lot of work. For example, sending emails to the right person required listing the universities and their faculty members, and then finding the faculty members who were actively looking for prospective graduate students and whose interests aligned with my own.
So, what’s next? At this point, it’s difficult to see the future. But I do have plans for my major projects, such as App Manager, SetEdit, and the related projects, including Android Libraries, LibAdb, and Android Debloat List (ADL). So, if you are a user of these applications, you can rest assured that these apps will be continued to be maintained. The other applications, unfortunately, have to be abandoned either because I no longer use them or do not find the necessassity to provide an update. This may seem a cruel decision to make, but graduate life is a busy life as one has to attend classes, do research, conduct classes, in addition to all the regular responsibilities, and it’s quite difficult manage enough time for open source development. So, I tried to keep things as simple as possible, but even then the development may slow down, and I need to adjust things a little bit. For example, I may no longer publish any major releases. Instead I may roll out new features with each minor release. This is a model that many companies follow nowadays (which in my opinion is not a good practice). But my current plan is to release the next (and preferably, the final) beta for App Manager as soon as possible. The release is mostly ready, only the documentation part remained. I have also planned to modify a few features in SetEdit, but this may take some time.
App Manager, at this point, has become a quite valuable project, and there are audiences for it. However, I don’t see any significant contributions from any other party which is quite disappointing. While it is understandable that many people do not like to contribute to a project (they want to start and maintain a new project instead), sustaining a project is quite difficult, especially for a project like App Manager which breaks every time a new Android version is released. So, I would advise developers to start contributing to the project. I still have many exciting features in my mind, and if you can help me implement those, it will be not only beneficial for the users but also to you, for your future career as a software engineer or a researcher.
Goodnight.