This repository hosts the code used for building Androoster (Tweaking Toolbox), available on the Play Store, with approximately 250k downloads.
The app started off as a side project, to put in one place, behind a nice UI, all the little tweaks and tricks you can apply on your phone to modify its specifics and characteristics, in order to alter its operating capabilities (namely, battery life, speed or specific configurations)
I despise with every fiber of my body the "Booster"/"Cleaner" software category. They gaslight users and make them expect their phone to have the air maneuverability of a F-22 Raptor, and make developers look foolish for trying to sell software whose claims aren't in the domain of realistic capabilities for the device they run on. It's immoral and unethical to charge people for crapware that does nothing but display satisfying UI and run nonsense tasks. That's sadly a big piece of android culture and market sells, and it sucks. There is much more work done in all of these app to make the UI and UX feel rewarding, giving positive user feedback and pleasing transitions and crafty animations, rather than in making them actually do something useful.
This software is a toolbox. A collection of pre-packaged system-wide modifications that can be turned on-off like a breaker switch. Some will work for your device, some won't. The takeaway is that you have to know what you are doing before touching something.
I started writing this app as a self-taught android developer when I was 16 years old. I was more into the low-level android operating system details rather than the clean application building process. The app has been written in java and then completely reworked in (very not idiomatic) kotlin. The code is here more for (archaeological) exposition, rather than actual app design or code principles. From a software engineering / good android app engineering standpoint, you can probably learn a lot of what not to do by following this code. It's messy, loosely unorganized, very repetitive and with tons of god-classes, obscure names and weird hierarchies. That's not to say it doesn't work, just that it works clumsily.
While the tweaks and operative system modifications were tailored (and work accurately) for devices running android versions from Jelly Bean up to to Marshmallow, they are not intended or do not consider the structural changes brought forth by future android versions, since they didn't exist when the app was being built. Besides, the need for this kind of software has long died (or at least it did for me personally) with the optimizations and improvements with newer android versions.
The current version has been slightly modified from the OG one (I fixed some issues, deleted dead dependencies, upgraded kotlin, removed billing, bumped gradle and fixed the most inhumane AndroidX dependency / manifest merger build failure I have ever witnessed in my entire life, which took about a month) to comply with idiotic GP requirements (the app was initially removed from the store because I was being accused of "charging devices faster", which, of all the screwed up things this app may do to users flipping switches left and right, is not even possible (AFAIK there are no standard APIs for controlling charging rates). I successfully appealed and rebuilt this app, now it's back on the store).
This code is also here for all the russian guys on 4pda redistributing pirated versions of my software, this way you can take it straight from the source code without reverse-engineering the apk. Now the software is 100% free though, so there should be no reason to.
This project won't receive any new feature. At least none by me. I'll happily push bug fixes and make maintenance updates once in a long while though.
Currently the project doesn't compile (with approx. 1000 errors) because anko isn't compatible anymore, so I have to rebuild it and re-link all the views.