Today marks the sixth anniversary of App Manager. Over the years, I have made significant effort to develop an app that offers some level of control over the digital life in the Android ecosystem.
As of today, I wrote almost 250k lines of code (LOC) with over one million addition and removal in the version control system via 3,650 commits (that’s 1.6 commit/day or 11.7 commits/week on average). I have closed almost 1,900 issues and handled over 2,000 private emails. We have over 200 translators translating App Manager in 39 languages.
My efforts has largely been a success. Since I do not track users, and we do not have exact figures from F-Droid, I can only give you GitHub download statistics. From GitHub alone, App Manager has been downloaded over 681,170 times (the latest version alone was downloaded 225,321 times. It also reports over 13k biweekly unique active visitors and over 28k biweekly user engagement. This easily makes it one of the most engaging and active personal open source projects ever developed (which is also completely absent from the mainstream app stores).
I stopped the fundraising campaign in 2024, almost two years ago due to personal reasons. In 2021-24, we hold four fundraising campaign each spanning three months and were able to secure almost $5,000, which was largely a success considering the amount of users at the time.
App Manager project is not just an app, rather it is a front-end. It relies on at least five other projects for various features, such as Android Debloat List, Android Libraries, LibADB. Some of the projects have also helped other people in the long run. LibADB, in particular, has made adaptation of ADB-based features mainstream among the developers who build utility software alongside Shizuku (which is still non-free and as such many FLOSS lovers still ignore).
App Manager is also one of the first material designed utility software on Android. In fact, one motivation for developing App Manager was the lack of well-designed software. Back then, there used to be a lot of utility software on F-Droid (most of them are now in F-Droid Archive), but none of them had modern design, because those applications were developed at a time when many developers actively rejected the Lollipop-era design and stuck with the pre-Lollipop design. Another issue was that the tools largely offered just one particular feature. So, we had to install several applications to achieve something that could’ve been just a single standalone tool. This was the second motivation.
App Manager is developed for my personal use. If you are a software engineer or work in a tech company, you know how difficult it is to come up with a good design. This is partly because most of the people involved in the production never really use the product. So, they fail to think from the perspective of the user. App Manager is different. It’s developed for my personal use, and I use various features several times everyday. So, I have a good understanding of the issues and how to solve them from an user’s perspective. This is what made it so powerful. But be aware that App Manager is a very sophisticated and advanced utility software. It takes a lot of effort to keep it scalable, and unless you are a tech savy individual, you will probably never be able to appreciate its true depth. Although I wrote a 85 page documentation for App Manager (which is also very rare for a tool like this), it is very much incomplete.
What lies ahead? The future, as I see it, is very much uncertain. We are in a situation where things can go really bad at any moment. We can finally see a mutual agreement among the leaders of the world regarding mass surveillance (whatever they say out loud regarding privacy and security are just a sham), and I do not see anybody doing anything against this alliance. As Saruman put it, they “are to remove only those who oppose” them. But as Captain Nemo has said, “There is hope for the future. When the world is ready for a new and better life, all this will someday come to pass, in God’s good time.”