Intentsiti

Intentsiti is a helper app - by itself, it does almost nothing. But when called upon by another app using the Android Intent mechanism, it allows that app access to various bits of data from your device.

It was primarily designed to extend the capabilities of the MIT App Inventor 2 framework (AI2). This is a massively fun, fast, easy way to create apps, but it has some limitations on what it can know about the device it's running on.

So I decided to utilize the system built-in to Android, and create an external

component that AI2 apps can call on for support.

Other Android apps and programming tools, such as SL4A, are able to use it as well. All it takes is the ability to generate an Explicit Intent. Intentsiti sends the results back to the calling app as an easy-to-parse text string.

The minimal user interface is only used to change Intentsity settings, and access the extensive documentation. Otherwise, it runs in the background of your apps, silently providing them with information. It's been tested on everything from cheap phones to high-end tablets.

This version of Intentsiti can return the following useful bits of information:

- Android build number

- Android ID (supposed to be device unique, but may not be)

- A UUID built from the Android ID and Telephony ID (may be more device unique)

- The number of cameras on this device

- The current battery and power supply status and levels

- The root path to the SD card (real or emulated)

- Information about the external storage device

- The current state of the external storage device

- A list of files and directories at a given path

- Filesystem stats - (size, permissions, modified date) of any given file/directory

- Current WiFi status - state, SSID, BSSID, speed, signal

- Wifi info - device MAC addess, current IP address

- Current phone status - type, call state, data state and activity, operator name

- Phone info - phone ID (i.e. IMEI/ESN/MEID),software version (IMEI/ISV), subscriber ID (i.e. IMSI),phone number (MSISDN)

The Phone and Wifi info commands may be disabled, in case you don't want this potentially sensitive information available to other apps.

The web page has a couple of sample apps showing how to use Intentsiti from App Inventor 2. More samples and more features will be added regularly, so stay tuned.