App Throttler: I Slowed Down My Own Apps and Ended Up Building a Network Tool for Android
· Pradeep Chandran M
Android, Networking, VPN, Developer Tools
It all started with a habit I couldn't break. I was addicted to a few apps on my phone. I knew it, and I tried everything people usually recommend. Minimal launchers. App locks. Usage timers. Every one of them worked for a couple of days, and then I found a way around it or simply turned it off. Eventually I gave up on all of them. The problem with those tools is that they all work the same way: they put a wall in front of the app. And a wall you built yourself is a wall you know how to climb. The Idea From Atomic Habits Around that time I was reading Atomic Habits. One idea from the book stuck with me: if you want to break a bad habit, don't rely on willpower, make it difficult. Add resistance between you and the thing you keep reaching for. That made me look at the problem differently. I didn't need to block the apps. I needed to make them annoying to use. So I thought, why not just limit their internet speed? A feed that takes ten seconds to load every post is not a feed you scroll for an hour. The app still opens, nothing is locked, there is nothing to bypass. It just stops being rewarding. Looking for an App That Does This I went looking for an app that could do it. I couldn't find one that fit. Most of the options slowed down the whole device, not one app. I didn't want all my apps crawling just because one app was a problem. Most of the real solutions needed a rooted device, and I wasn't going to root my phone for this. That is when I realised something bigger than my own problem: there was no proper tool to manage the network on Android. On a desktop browser we take this for granted. Open the dev tools, pick "Slow 3G" from a dropdown, and you can watch your site struggle on a bad connection. On Android, on a real device, with a real app, there was nothing like that. So the idea grew. Instead of a small hack to fix my own habit, why not build a full application for developers? Introducing App Throttler App Throttler is an Android app that puts the network of…