Android Unleashed: Optimizing My Smartphone

OCR with Google Lens; Add URL shortcuts to homescreen; App - 'Shortcut Maker'; Android Widgets and Shortcuts; screenshots of folders - ‘Reading’; ‘Reference’; ‘Content’

This is the fourth and final part of a four-part series on my recommended tech hacks. They are (what I believe to be) relatively simple, accessible tech hacks that I personally find useful. I believe many of these are highly underrated. The previous piece was: “Optimizing my Desktop: Windows Operating System, Chrome, Docs, and Colab“ (October 3, 2023, which included: Disable all default bloatware and ads, and remove all default pinned to taskbar; Chrome - Pin Tabs; Docs - Change Layout to Pageless). See also my previous piece on my mobile setup: “Mobile Minimalism: Streamlining My Smartphone Layout” (July 5, 2023)

Google Lens, for OCR 

For optical character recognition.

Optical character recognition - Wikipedia:

“Optical character recognition or optical character reader (OCR) is the electronic or mechanical conversion of images of typed, handwritten or printed text into machine-encoded text, whether from a scanned document, a photo of a document, a scene photo (for example the text on signs and billboards in a landscape photo) or from subtitle text superimposed on an image (for example: from a television broadcast).”

Google Lens’ OCR works shockingly well, including for Hebrew text.

Chrome (Mobile) - Add URL shortcuts to homescreen

Even where a mobile app is available, it's often actually faster to use the Chrome mobile wepage, than to use the mobile app. And an added advantage is that I can share the URL with others. Another advantage is that there’s no need to take up space on the phone storage. 

Examples, where I’ll use URL shortcut instead of downloading the app:

1. Google Translate

2. Sefaria

3. Facebook

4. Wiktionary (Wikipedia's dictionary. Really good. I have links to the English and the Hebrew websites)

5. My Substack portal

6. Academia.edu

7. ChatGPT4 

A notable exception to this is Wikipedia. Their app is actually really good. It's highly customizable. I especially appreciate, on the Wikipedia app: 

• Dark Mode

• When you tap an entry hyperlink, it gives a preview of that entry.

App - 'Shortcut Maker'

At the Google Play Store here. For cases where Google chrome doesn't have the option to 'add to homescreen', but has 'download app' instead.

Examples:

1. Facebook

2. Sefaria

3. Times of Israel

Android Widgets

1. Calendar

2. WhatsApp (read unread messages)

3. YouTube Music (see what's playing, pause/play)

See the screenshot of my mobile homescreen in previous blogpost (“Mobile Minimalism“)

Android Native App Shortcuts

1. Gmail

Appendix - screenshots of folders - ‘Reading’; ‘Reference’; ‘Content’

The following image is a composite of four separate screenshots:

1. Icons of all eight folders on the homescreen of my phone.

2. All the app icons contained in the folder called ‘Reading’

3. All the app icons contained in the folder called ‘Reference’

4. All the app icons contained in the folder called ‘Content’