Keep Android Open Saga (3/6)

Evil

Google already has started locking-down android, and, is a few months from completely locking it down. Visit keepandroidopen.org for more information on how it affects you, and, what you can do about it. I will try to make this series easy enough to help you understand why we (as a species) are in this situation now. This post is part 3.

Certain corporate developers and tech leaders say that side-loading is a kind of evil. Side-loading is a fancy term to mean obtaining software on android phones through channels other than the formal appstore. There is probably a corporate blog post online which elegantly explains why its evil. And to paint that picture more gullible, they explain a plight of a certain victim of a "developing country". That story could be true or false; I haven't fact checked.

Shocking fact! Nobody really knows why Blue Whale? To learn more about the blue whale app, I suggest you search wikipedia. Today we don't know the evil perpetrators behind it. Perhaps a criminal psychologist can answer this question. Maybe some day someone will...

However, what you must think about is...why at all they (i.e such incidents) happen?

And, why is it "they"? (A plural). I am not alluding to the blue-whale app instance alone; there are other nefarious apps which have existed over time. Every year a new one keeps coming up. It has a different attacking mechanism. For e.g. if you are computer savvy, and you know a little linux, try searching youtube for the xz-hack. 

We are entering into a dark territory of our human existence on Earth. There are a lot of darker chapters when you venture here. Fortunately I am only going to deal with a small (and thus relatively less dark, yet evil) topic about digital scams. 

Lets forget the digital aspect of a much wider phenomenon called "scams". Why do scams happen? Is it the capitalist economy that breeds scams? Or, is it a private desire to feel powerful? Is it revenge? Whatever the reasons or agenda may be, when you observe the facts behind any scam story, the victims show some level of failure or weakness. The scammers engineer the victims to their point of failure. It could be their carelessness. It could be that the victim had a dark past when he/she was younger; that wasn't made public before; and the scammer used this fact to blackmail.

Digital scams are no different. In digital scams, the "technology" factors into the fray. Digital or otherwise, scams continue to crop up in one form or another, and, in ever ingenious ways. 

Can humanity cure "the need for scamming"?

But what will you/we do? 

Stop capitalism? Promote communism? Promote capitalism with furious taxes? Find the gene responsible for megalomania/revenge/jealousy, and, attempt a slow and gradual genocide?!

We've done it all! (Somewhat. Or at least tried). History has all the answers. I don't have all the know-how. For e.g. the holocaust was all about the extermination of a certain race of people, because one set of people who believed they were a superior race, were radicalized to believe that the former group of people were in part inferior, and shrewd business minded people. This interpretation of "why" the holocaust happened, isn't all that complete. But capitalism played its small role in aggravating that "evil".

Let me bring you back to the grand saga for a moment. Do you think a "walled garden" is the solution? Humanity's cure for stopping all scams?! And now again, lets for a moment, forget you knew about walled gardens or scams...what can put a stop to rampant capitalism or aggressive sales marketing in society. (Think about the Wolf Gupta's of our society).

Will an "appstore" stop a "wolf"? The recent events surrounding seems to suggest people think that fortifying that garden they can prevent it to some degree. They are somewhat right. There is a small issue here. I will explore that in the next post.

Thankyou for reading.

Keep Android Open Saga (2/6)

A beautiful draconian garden

Google already has started locking-down android, and, is a few months from completely locking it down. Visit keepandroidopen.org for more information on how it affects you, and, what you can do about it. I will try to make this series to help you understand why we (as a species) are in this situation now. This post is part 2.

Appstores grew in scale. A lot of applications started appearing on it. This software included all possibily imaginable categories - dating, matrimony, games, productivity, health. It is exactly hard to say when and why, but, a lot of nefarious apps came to be available on the appstores. On linux it wasn't much of a headline-news kind of a problem. On android...well, news spread like wild fire. Case in point is an app called Blue Whale. I am intentionally not going into horrific details about that phenomenon. 

Appstores (not just Google's) became a little bit stricter on allowing software to be available on their platforms. In Google's case, a few developers thought that Google's rules were too draconian or strict. For e.g., A clever android developer, made an app which might allow the owner of the phone to control the phone's wifi. And that app lived on the playstore for a while. Many people would have downloaded and became fans of the app. The os developers, on one fine one day, advocated against it. "Software shouldn't over-pressure your hardware". (There is valid reason for this). However, in the end, such applications would be dropped from the appstore. On the other hand, our developer would have had genuine users for this fictious app. They must have had some use for it. And now that google android os developers decided it is a bad thing the users and the concerned app developers, had to suffer disappointment.

That isn't the entire story, however, it is probably one of the reasons "many other" appstores came to sprout. These appstores were specifically for the android operating system. In other words, these alternative appstores were intended to supply software on android phones. But, how were people able to install such software onto the phones? I suppose a lot of MS Windows users of the 90s era might introspect and have an answer to that question. If the answer doesn't come to you, perhaps, become a little social and ask around. 

I made up a fictious scenario to explain why a "walled-garden" came to exist. And "bad fruits" in that garden would be plucked off. Perhaps the use of the word "draconic" in the title is a bit harsh. Because in this fictional scenario the corporate is correct. Why?! Phones are relatively delicate devices. They are powered by lithium batteries. They need to be operated with care. If some software exerted the battery too much the phone could blow up (or explode) on my hand or other body parts, (my eyes for e.g). I could sue google for damages. It is a pessismistic way of putting it. But on a more nobler note, Google is actually trying to protect you - the consumer, by bringing "restrictions" on its platform. 

I hope you'd come to understand that certain people will be concered about these restrictions. They are a small group. The others (i.e the majority) see a very colorful garden where they can get "software they want" downloaded and installed onto their phones.

You probably already understand that "bad fruit" in the context probably means an app that defies a corporate os developer's norms. In the next post, you will have a much wider concept of the term.

Thankyou for reading.

Keep Android Open Saga - (1/6)

Opensource And Appstores

Google already has started locking-down android, and, is a few months from completely locking it down. Visit keepandroidopen.org for more information on how it affects you, and, what you can do about it. I will try to make this series easy enough to help you understand why we (as a species) are in this situation now. This post is part 1.

Opensource was flourishing in the 2005s. Android was born. It was a phone operating system. Being opensource and everything, it meant one could theoretically acquire source code and compile it on their hardware. In reality this is a very complex task; not meant for ordinary folks. 

It was also the age of software proliferation. If there was an app that existed on the Macintosh and it was popular, it slowly made it way onto windows, and, yes eventually android. But that happens a little later in time. 

Before that came appstores. It is a kind of service available on the internet where one could obtain software they want onto their operating system - i.e the android smart phones. The android's appstore was called Google Play or sometimes Playstore. 

But opensource and software proliferation are not the same idea. One must pause and wonder about that last paragraph. Android is opensource. It is linux based. On its own, theoretically speaking, it really doesn't need an appstore. You didn't have to explicitly depend on an organization or corporation to be able to get software onto your phones or other desktop software. Android is kind of a derivative of linux (?). Many flavors of linux that existed around that time - ubuntu, fedora, archlinux, etc - they too had the same concept (as that of appstores) but it was commonly called "repositories". The primary "function" of the repositories was to make your computer "less vulnerable" or "more secure". And from this point of view, appstores became more "strict" or "harsh".

Ordinary people take many aspects of Android (or iOS) for granted. For e.g. many people are unaware how the phone is able to notify you of a new chat message (on whatsapp/telegram/instagram/whatever)? (To keep things short, it isn't like an SMS notification). There is a great deal of cloud infrastructure and related redundancies in place. When you buy a phone, nobody tells you that some part of your identity is going to live on that infrastructure. 

Appstores are a small part in that entire infrastructure. In the next part we will try to understand more about the various roles appstores came to have over the years. 

Thankyou for reading.

A collatz weekend

TLDR; found an opensource python software for printing a graph. My program got referenced by the developer over at the repo discussions page. Understood where ascii and where graphical printing makes sense. I also share a few thoughts on opensource. 

My youtube algorithm suggested a Veritasium video on the collatz conjecture. In it there was a graph - for a long time I wanted to print it. Here is an example of the graph which was shown in the Veritasium video. And what follows are two images I generated using other opensource software.

Fig1. Graph plot from the Veritasium video

Fig 2. pygraphviz plot

Fig 3. Ascii plot using binarytree python library

These graphs are generally called collatz graph or collatz chains. It is built on a simple mathematical rule which we won't discuss here. The specific graph I have printed is called a reverse-collatz graph. But note that the 3rd image is an ascii print of the same graph. 

Oh wait! Do you know what is a "graph"? Or do you know what "ascii" is? I think I must devote some time to introduce some fancy computer science terms. However, I am not going to delve deep into them. The impatient readers can skip the next few sections and directly read from the section called "My opensource library hunt"

Graphs

YOU don't really need to know what a graph is...It has no significance in your day-to-day life! That picture above is an example of a graph. It is a node which is connected to other nodes via lines called edges. In practice, the nodes/edges represent something. I am sure most visitors here have used Google Maps; it uses "graphs". Its neatly abstracted to you, the consumer. 

Binary Tree

The collatz graph which I tried to print is a kind of "binary tree". I have hidden most of the "binariness" to make it look plesant. Another example of a binary tree is the famous pascal's triangle. This is another mathematical term that is of no consequence to people's lives.

Fig 4. Somewhere in Ladakh

Yet it is out there in world. Staring back at you. Oblivious; in plain sight.

ASCII

It is an encoding standard for storing and transmitting information. Simply put if I save some text file (with a few sentences) onto a disk, and, I sent that disk to you...you use your computer to access that disk and read that text file and it contents...if the computer displays the correct sentences - how do you think that is possible?

This is a remarkable invention by human beings. It is the backbone of the internet. It is because of ascii many subtle things happen in life - good or bad:

1. You are able to read this blog post.

2. An expectant father is able to view the first pictures of his new born child while he is located on a different continent compared to his spouse's labour ward.

3. People nefariously indulge in relatively evil practices like pornography, blackmail, riots, etc.

4. Etc.

Shakespear once said, the web of life is of mingled yarn - the good and bad together. Maybe I failed in social science - and today its via ascii that I am coming to realize a lot more about our own species. (And I am a quadrigenarian)

Why print in ascii?

1. I can easily print the graph in a text file

2. I don't have to worry about scale. Most plotting libraries, will take into account the drawing area and auto-scale the plots.

3. I don't need special software to view my outputs. A simple text editor (with word-wrap-off) would do.

My opensource library hunt

In python, we usually have matplotlib for plotting stuff. But instead I thought that I would want to see the graphs better and not be worried about "scale" or drawing-area-sizes. Therefore ascii; there was no further reason than that initially. 

Finally came to discover a small library phart - Python Heirarchial Ascii Rendering Tool. Of course if you are someone who quickly alluded to some nasty things humans and often other mammals indulge in; you are excused.

The version I had got via pypi (i.e. pip install). It had a dependency of another pythonic graph software called "networkx". It was fairly quick for me to setup and get to printing outputs. But later I came to understand that the plots were incorrect. And I posted in on the github repo discussions. I waited for the response. Meanwhile I discovered another graph plotting package. This wasn't a python library. It was a C program called graphiviz. And there were python ports of graphviz which I then explored. And it internally used matplotlib to plot. But then the phart developer of the repo got back with fixes to my issue. And then I got to printing.

What kind of plot to choose and when?

This section won't be useful for anyone unless you are into research involving graph theory or you need to do some graph based computations.

(A) Choose a image-based graph plotting solutions when you need the following:

1. Auto-scaling.

2. High detail in nodes/edges

3. Aesthetics

(B) Choose ascii graph plotting when you need the following:

1. Searchability

2. Plotting to scale is not needed

3. Simple text file based sharing is important.

Most people will choose approach A. However, the final say is really a matter of requirement. I was doing it as a weekend fun project. If I were a PG student writing a research paper on the Collatz conjecture, I'd probably do both ascii printing and graphical renderings. But I'd use the latter when I write my research paper.

Opensource Affairs

Here is a small appreciation to phart developer and opensource

When I first tinkered with phart it was buggy. My output wasn't coming right. I thought it may be my incorrect use of the APIs. I posted onto the repo discussions page, and, in fact shared by whole program there and asked the developer if I was doing it wrong. He admitted his code had a bug. And he fixed it in a span of few days. It didn't matter if he took a month, or, even a year. He got back to me. These are qualities I adore.

Fig 5. ascii plot using phart

I have posted issues and interacted in developer forums and slack groups of other opensource software. The larger they are it is likely that the issue you post (or raise) is not given enough attention. There are many reasons why this can happen, but, I leave it to you the reader. And there are a few issues I have raised in some repos that belong to a few infamous organizations that need attention.

[Rant] Google Photos Library API ens***tification

TLDR; Google Photos Library API is intentionally limited. Most tutorials will show how you can access your entire data. They are outdated. This is the state in Feb 2026.

I am a Google one customer. Most people know that this means I rent a finite amount of cloud storage. My Google Photos takes a significant amount of storage space. Now that storage is becoming full. 

So naturally I wanted to off-load. It is somewhat possible through their website app; but that can be cumbersome. Google Photos Library API showed some promise. I believed that I could access data on Google programmatically. I had experiencd with Google Apps Scripts before, and, believed this was possible.

Being the relatively lonesome developer that I am...I thought I could quickly hack some python program to help me out with this task. 

The choice of "python" is inconsequential. Most google searches related to this topic will result in some pythonic script which understands how to talk to the library api. But make note, that I have never tried this before, and, I have heard or had a faint memory that google allows you to programmatically access your data stored on its various services.

Therefore I thought this farce objective of mine was achievable. And I set about a journey to learn how to work the python code and learn from video tutorials and blogs on the subject. 

This is where you walk into a realm of oauth authentication. If you aren't a developer you can skip over this paragraph. And I am not going to go into this topic deeply either. There is a technical term associated with it called permission scopes (aka permissions) which controls your access to your "resource". Most tutorials say that "you have to this specific scope" and you magically can access your "resource".

Lo and behold...when I tried the tutorial examples myself, I was unable to access my data on Google photos. I initially got "request forbidden" or that I am "unauthorised". I understood that this meant I misconfigured some permission. I later fixed it. (After referring to documentation). And on the next trial, the script executed without errors and said that I had no albums!!?

That is when I took a closer read of the documentation. There was a link to an update. That further confirmed more disappointment. They have sunset the ability to entirely access since March 2025. I am trying to learn all this, with the mislead hope, in Feb 2026! And now I wonder why the tutorials weren't updated! 😖

So the state of affairs now is that you can script and upload data, and, download/access that data you have uploaded via that script. This hardly solves my requirement. There was probably a time developers had access to entire data. But Google has now intentionally limited this. I am frustrated at this pattern of capitalism that I decline to comment further on this.

I could have used AI to help. But honestly it was too early for that. I was simply on a exploration spree and I hit mildly sad news. However all internet searches prior to being "saddened" said that my goal was achievable. 

For those who have reached this paragraph, Google Takeout is the only option for a complete backup. I hear that it thorns and caveats. I shall leave it for the world to rant on that subject.

Will you invite Mark Zuckerberg to your wedding?

TLDR; this is just a critique on the default non-private design of Whatsapp, a famous messaging app. Many apps adopt this design principle. We have to be critical of such design and the people behind those designs.

You own a sim belonging to a particular network. The sim is capable of storing a few mobile numbers. However, these days people have their contacts synced up in Google. Having google contacts makes it easy to restore contacts onto a new phone. This is relatively convenient for many consumers.

Most people in India prefer using a single mobile sim for all purposes. Culturally this dates back to the days when people had landline telephones. Each house would probably have only one phone line and a single phone number. It was enough; it served its purpose. For our various domestic needs at the time, we'd often call an electrician, plumber, etc. Back in those days we stored their numbers in a diary. The wired telephones of that time did not have a capability to store phone numbers on it.

Cut to the modern day, traditional SIMs have an upper limit as to how much numbers they can store. These limits are far superseded by what can be stored on Google Contacts. 

Now whatsapp is a modern messaging app which the company called as Meta, formerly Facebook, has acquired a long while back. A long while back it has introduced the system of showing a status. 

A WhatsApp Status is a feature in WhatsApp that lets you share updates with your contacts in a certain format. Primarily the section below will outline it

📌 Key Details of WhatsApp Status

• Temporary posts: A status update lasts for 24 hours before disappearing automatically.
• Content types: You can post text, photos, videos, GIFs, or links.
• Privacy controls: You decide who can see your status (all contacts, selected contacts, or exclude specific ones).
• End-to-end encryption: Like chats, statuses are protected so only the people you choose can view them.
• Replies: Friends can reply directly to your status, which starts a private chat.

🎯 Purpose

• Share moments (like a trip photo or a thought of the day).
• Broadcast announcements (e.g., “Closed today” for a business).
• Express moods or creativity with text, emojis, and stickers.

⚡ Example

• You post: “Enjoying the sunset 🌅” with a photo.
• Your contacts see it in the Status tab.
• After 24 hours, it disappears automatically.

So, a WhatsApp Status is essentially your short-lived story or update that your contacts can view for a day.

It is a given that Whatsapp has privacy controls which enable controlling who you are going to share your update with. But people do not realize that out-of-the-box, your status updates go to everyone in your contacts who also use whatsapp.

Why would you want to share your "personal" status update with your plumber/electrician/taxi driver/etc? These are people not directly connected with most aspects of your life. Would you invite these people to your wedding, or, your children's wedding? Perhaps there are a few people who might invite such people to their marriages or important life events. But statistically speaking they don't make the majority of people in urban India. (In Indian villages, the story is a little different). 

What do we do about it? Are we not meant to store contacts of local service providers in our phone contacts? Are they meant to be only reached via internet search? Are we supposed to have a different mobile number and phone only meant to store the number of local service providers?

What does it say about the company or the person who has designed such an app? Does he care about your privacy? Will you invite such a person to your family wedding? The creators or owners of such apps are considered celebrities. There is a certain social allure to invite a celebrity to your personal life event. It might give you a relative social flair if you get to mention that a celebrity is attending your marriage. To me, personally that idea is insane. If you are likely to show such a behavior, then you might surely will get labelled as a status-seeking social and selfish animal with no concern to protect the society you live in.

On a relative positive vein of thought, perhaps one could argue that "that design" is actually meant to make you "more" privacy conscious. It is what is required by the ever-changing modern times. I don't agree. Perhaps life might go this route...One day our future generations should be thought in schools itself to be privacy conscious. But the kind of privacy issues in the modern day were much different a few centuries back. Case-in-point - you should probably read the classic by T.H called "The Mayor of Casterbridge". We were not bothered by privacy those days. Why should we now?

[Rant] A gmail google takeout frustration

 ⚠️ The intention here is not to point fingers at products or an organization. 

TLDR; I tried to "cleanse" my gmail inbox, and, gave up. But I discovered some pythonic support related things along the way. Respect for that. 🙏

If you are someone from my generation, I am sure statistically speaking there must be around 50k unread emails in your inbox. I do not want to explain why that is so. It is a fun exercise to try to understand why the dire state of such email inboxes. But in this blog post, I guess it is enough to sum it up by stating that most of us are victims of capitalism and the communication revolution.

I set out on the journey of reducing my Google One storage foot print. Somewhere in one of Google One's web pages, we can see product wise usage of the storage. (Between Photos, Gmail, Drive, etc). Gmail wasn't the culprit here. Gmail had some sizable chunk of data, but, Photos was taking 7x more than that. 

Therefore I figured out what I could cull from my gmail inbox. There are a lot of things I need to keep - like bank statements, receipts, personal communications with people in my friends circle, etc. There are a lot of things I can discard - all of those facebook notification emails, quora email digests, etc.

At this stage, there is no point in wondering why the inbox is flooded with these. At one point I was active into social media, and, therefore I never considered those emails as junk. But now they are! Oh, how the times have changed!!

I assumed that there could be a way to estimate what I am about to delete, and, then actually delete it. In other words, I could say that I wanted to delete which I deemed unnecessary, and, not something accidentally.

My plan was to do a kind of data analysis on the data. In simpler words, find out who is spamming me. Then gather the data, and, write a google app scripts to delete the emails. But I was in for a shock. Highlighting two important points below:

1. Many mail items had received time, but they are not timezone normalized. In some cases a few the formats itself were varying. There is no reason why one should expect data that way. 

2. You cannot trace a mail item to a thread. Gmail servers organize emails as conversation threads. Each thread has a unique identifier. I know this since I have played around gmail inboxes via google app scripts. There looks to be an identifier but there is no correlation with what is on gmail servers. 

These two reasons make it absolutely impossible for me to decide what to delete before I delete.

I used jupyter notebooks and pandas to help we out with this exercise. I was surprised that python had built-in support for working with mbox files. My choice to use a programming language such as python is personal. The language and its ecosystem is quite mature towards data analysis. I am sure others language ecosystems exist. However, after saying all this I am not trying to evangelize usage of some product or another. 

It has been more than 10+ years single google takeout released. It is natural for a bloke like to be shocked. Why is there no support the way you want it to be. I think it is probably because it takes efforts to design a archival system that supports your email server. And my use case happens to be niche. People may think more about backing up their data. Not find a convoluted way to "cleanse" it. 

However, I am hardly discouraging others to walk this path. In fact I encourage it. Who knows, a fresh set of eyes might discover something I could not. Just be happy to let people know if it comes to that.