An Introspection into your Android phone
As an Android developer and tech enthusiast for the last 15 years or so, I have probably worked on over 200 apps professionally. Yet, sometimes I still make time to work on more apps in my spare time. When you need something that doesn’t exist, and you just know you could make it yourself, there’s an itch that needs scratching. Introspect is the result of such an itch.
If you’re a smartphone enthusiast or a developer who likes to tinker with their devices, you know how frustrating it can be to try to find information about your phone’s hardware and software capabilities. It’s not always easy to find the specs or details you need, and some information may even be impossible to uncover without a specialized tool. What version is this app? What SDK level am I running? What is my WiFi signal strength? My IP-address? We started labeling all our test devices with stickers on the back with their OS version, screen size and resolution, but soon enough we ran out of space to put stickers. Not to mention OS updates requiring a sticker update.
That’s where the Introspect app comes in. While it’s been around for a few years, this handy tool is still a must-have for anyone who wants to get a complete picture of what their device is capable of. I created it to quickly see the software details of my device, but then it snowballed into something big. From the Android SDK I found our I could read all sensor details, supported camera resolutions, battery details, everything. Colleagues jumped in to help: every time one of us needed to know something that wasn’t there, we could just add it to the app! Indeed developing sometimes feel like a superpower.
The app gives you detailed information about your phone’s hardware, software, and sensors. You can see everything from your device’s CPU and RAM usage to its battery level and temperature. You can also get detailed information about your camera, including its resolution, focal length, and exposure time. But it doesn’t end there: it provides tools to determine WiFi strength and audio levels and cheatsheets for all Android SDKs.
We’ve designed this tool to work on Android versions as far as Google would let us. We managed to keep it working on Eclair for quite a while before the Google libraries got too outdated. Either way, this is still a great tool for anyone who wants to get a deeper understanding of their Android device. It’s easy to use, informative, lightweight, and packed with useful features. Give it a try and let us know what you think!
Of all the features listed, here are some of the best ones that stand out:
- System — This feature provides a complete list of hardware and software capabilities of your device, including CPU power, memory, browser agent, OpenGL properties, and all available hardware and software features. This is incredibly useful for developers who want to test their apps on specific screen sizes or OS versions.
- Cameras — This feature goes beyond just the number of megapixels and provides detailed information about all the properties of your device’s camera, such as zoom factors, face detection, exposure compensations, and much more. This can be very helpful for photography enthusiasts who want to maximize the capabilities of their device’s camera.
- Signal strength meters — This feature provides simple ‘heart rate’ pulse graphs of your current WiFi signal strength. This can help you find dead spots in your house and strategically place your router for better connectivity.
- Cheat sheets — This feature provides a list of Android SDK version numbers, as well as examples of all the Porter-Duff image overlay modes. As a developer, having these often-needed pieces of information readily available can save a lot of time and effort.
You can find Introspect in the Play store here.
I’m Mathijs “Mat” Lagerberg, founder of Pixplicity. This app is just one of the cool things we build at Pix. We build these out of passion for our jobs, and what we learn helps us when building our next project. As you can see, we know Android inside and out! If you want to know more about the things we do, have a look at our portfolio or reach out directly!
