Project

App Manager

App Manager is a suite of tools and utilities for Android operating system that helps the users improve their privacy and usability. This is primarily done by managing the installed applications. Most applications come with privacy-invasive advertisements, trackers and permissions which cannot be controlled in most cases because neither the application nor the operating system offers such features to the end users. App Manager can provide these features by utilising Android hidden APIs when the privileged mode is enabled. During initialization, it is capable of adjusting its threat model based on the features available in the operating system using a greedy approach (e.g. it runs in privileged mode when the device is rooted). The users can later adjust it based on their own set of requirements. Another important goal of App Manager is sharing insights about an application with the users to improve their understanding of the application. This facilitates proactive prevention of privacy and security incidents which are ever on the increase in the Android platform. It encourages the users to ask questions regarding certain behaviour of an app or certain features offered by the platform itself. As an example of awareness spread by App Manager, a user discovered a critical privacy issue in Android operating system. App Manager is also built with cutting-edge and ever-evolving design concepts such as Material Design 3 with some home-made designs to fill the remaining gaps on those concepts. It also has an extensive user manual that is available both online and offline inside the application. Features, design principles and goals on the whole has made it quite popular among the Android users as the number of users are constantly growing with more than a hundred thousand downloads in GitHub alone with more than eight thousand followers in various social media channels. I have also raised more than $3,500 for the application using Open Source Collective.