BANNED – Nexus 6 Stock Check App

In my quest for a Nexus 6, I wrote a small app to pound Google’s product pages waiting for it to come in stock. Not surprisingly Google found it a “SPAM violation” (fair enough) and removed it from the Play store. There are other stock check apps on the store today that aren’t flagged, so I’m not quite sure how mine is worse. Don’t get me wrong, I completely understand why they pulled it.

Anyway, I think the app is fun so here it is on Github. The source is there of course if you are interested / worried about what it’s doing. Like I mentioned, there are other such apps on the Play Store, but this one is ad-free, and works quite cleanly with little system overhead (and battery drain).

If Google had pre-order (hello?) then there’d be no need for apps like this. It’s the difference between an orderly line and a mob. I don’t understand their reasoning. Perhaps they want to encourage people to visit and re-visit their site looking for the product.

httpmon – HTTP Server Monitor

I just published a new application to the Android Market: httpmon. In a nutshell, it allows you to monitor the status of any number of HTTP servers. A monitor is made up of 1) a request which describes how to contact the server, 2) one or more conditions that must hold true to consider the server “valid”, and 3) zero or more actions to take if the server is “invalid”.

This was another learning exercise. I wanted to play around with how I would structure an extensible object model in Android. The app source is structured so that the conditions and action class trees are easily extensible at both the model and view level to add new types of conditions and actions. I’m quite happy with how well it came out in that regard. None of this is probably visible from using the app however.

I hope that at least some people find this useful, as I’m looking forward to receiving input for new types of conditions and actions.

Supported conditions,

• ping
• response time
• response code
• content contains (substring, wildcard, or regex match)
• header container (substring, wildcard, or regex match)

Supported actions,

• notification (alert sound, flash, and / or vibrate)
• send SMS

I wanted to have a “send email” action, but it turns out that there is no way to send an email programmatically, on behalf of the user, with Android. I am not sure why they would let an app send an SMS on behalf of the user, but not an email. An SMS seems more dangerous actually. Of course, I could have used JavaMail, but that means gathering an SMTP server and port, and supporting credentials. Most users will lack the will or the way to set that up I think.