- New: Backup/restore screen
- Removed support for Android 4.3 and below
- Updated internal versions
Probably the one with the smaller features/time ratio!
There is only one new feature, but it's not a minor one, and it took me several years of planning, and a couple months of implementation:
Now you can backup/restore the app data.
Yes, that's right, that feature is finally here. This should hopefully allow people to keep a copy for preservation, allow to migrate data between devices, or even switch from different releases (like migrate from play store to fdroid).
The functionality is quite straightforward, but I managed to add a couple toggles to choose which data to backup/restore. The error management is a bit lacking unfortunately, I want to improve it in the future but for now I'll just wait in case bugs are reported.
The downside is that the backup required a functionality only available on a newer api version (for Android 4.4) and I decided to remove support for older versions (4.0.1 - 4.3). Considering that android 4.3 was released on early 2013 (more than 10 years ago), it's reported to run in less than 0.3% of available devices and most (if not all) of apps require android 5.0 at best (usually 8.0), I think it's fair.
Note: I don't like removing support for older devices, but in this case adding custom code to allow using that version required to include almost a full file picker implementation. I'm not using the app-compat library, not even sure if it will help though. If you are still using that version for some reason, you can still use the previous version without issue.
Special thanks to Ilithy for the original suggestion and general help.
You still here? I'll tell you a (not very) secret then: the backup file is just a zip! And the contents are mostly txt files! You can open it and check how the data is saved, or even modify and see what happens! (remember to keep a backup just in case...which now you can!)
It saddens me to see support for older versions being dropped. Especially considering the backup/restore feature being added in this version, and the fact that I just got a couple of new (to me) devices a few weeks ago, which are stuck* on v4.0.3 & v4.2.2, and on which I haven't quite got around to fully setting up UrlCheck exactly how I like it yet. This feature would have been very useful to me.
ReplyDeleteI don't want to be complainer, but... it just would have been such perfect timing to wake up this morning and be able to copy my preferred settings to them. (...well, actually I guess I'd still have to wait for F-Droid to update their build, but at least it would be coming soon...)
N.B. I understand your decision, and really appreciate that you're not bumping up the version requirements without cause. (or without telling us the reason.) Thank you.
Thank you for making this app. It significantly improves my day to day experience on my Android devices (even if 2 of them aren't fully set up yet), and I enjoy recommending it to friends and family.
* Apparently there was a build of v4.4 for I one of them once, but the update servers seem to have been shut down ages ago, and I can't find a copy of it online anywhere. 😢
P.S. This blog post is dated about a week ago, but the tag was only published in GitHub a few hours ago... 😕🤔🤷♂️
Honest question: with those old devices, which apps work? It was my understanding that most apps do not work at all, not even browsers, but I would like to be proven wrong.
DeleteEven if I tried to backport the features, the backup is the easy one, the restore not so much unfortunately. You can use adb to 'copy' the data if you need. With adb (and I think root) you can access the data yourself, it should be on "/data/data/com.trianguloy.urlchecker/shared_prefs/com.trianguloy.urlchecker.xml" and "/data/data/com.trianguloy.urlchecker/files/*". I'm sorry to disappoint, but implementing my own file picker is just too much work, and even with a simple version, increasing the sdk allowed me to cleanup some parts of the code with workarounds for those old versions. Again, I'm sorry, but I need to draw the line somewhere, and I think this was the moment to do so.
Yes, there was once a version of android 14, but I think it didn't work due to invalid permissions. I can generate the apk again if you want, but you won't be able to replace your current version with it, I'm afraid.
I uploaded a beta version on play store a week ago, and posted it here. I do this to make sure there are no unexpected errors. This morning I added the tag for f-droid, and will promote the play store to stable as soon as fdroid builds it.
Oh, that makes sense. Thanks for the insight into your release methodology.
ReplyDeleteAs for what apps work... unfortunately, not many, unless you count old, unsupported versions of apps that have been around long enough that once upon a time, they used to support those versions of Android.
I've been trying to find apps that still support such versions, as well as digging through archived old builds to find the things I need, but it's not easy.
As far as a way to support the restore feature on 4.3 and lower, I know of an app that offers a restore from backup functionality by launching an intent which a different app must recognize so it can feed the requested file back to the requestor, and I happen to know that Little File Manager (which does support [and works properly on] these versions) can handle that intent. Unfortunately I can't test that app on these devices because even if I mod the oldest APK of it I can find so it thinks it can support 4.x and let's me install it, it fails to launch. But if you do want to continue supporting versions earlier than 4.4, that's a method that might be possible..?
I'll also look into trying to root my devices at some point, but I'll probably just go through all the settings to fully set up UrlCheck to my liking manually on each of them before I get to that point.
*Little File Explorer
ReplyDeleteIs there a support group on Telegram for this App URLcheck? If no, then there should be. WDYT?
ReplyDeleteNo, no discord or other platforms either. But you can ask for help on the Github discussion page: https://github.com/TrianguloY/UrlChecker/discussions
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