Active Frames

A from-scratch Android recreation of BlackBerry OS10's "Active Frames" — a resizable home-screen widget of your most-recently-used apps as a scrollable grid of tiles, each showing the content of the app's latest notification (photo, album art, large icon) with a red star when there's something new.

Eine von Grund auf neu geschriebene Nachbildung von BlackBerry OS10s „Active Frames" — ein größenveränderbares Startbildschirm-Widget mit den zuletzt benutzten Apps als scrollbares Kachelraster; jede Kachel zeigt den Inhalt der letzten Benachrichtigung, roter Stern bei Neuem.

Requirements / Voraussetzungen

• Android 10 or newer (minSdkVersion 29). Built against / target targetSdkVersion 34 (Android 14).
• Läuft ab Android 10 aufwärts (Mindest-SDK 29), erstellt/geprüft gegen Ziel-SDK 34 (Android 14). Kein BlackBerry-Gerät nötig.

Screenshots

Widget 1 (Startbildschirm)

Einrichtung

Einstellungen

_{Screenshots aus dem echten Betrieb – persönliche Inhalte in einzelnen Kacheln wurden geschwärzt.}

Features

• Scrollable tile grid widget, freely resizable. Adjustable columns, tile height (i.e. aspect ratio — rectangular like BlackBerry's screens, not only square), tile count, variable row heights (larger rows on top), and an optional scrolling mode (see note below).
• MRU order like BlackBerry: top-left is the most recently used app, then the one before, and so on (via UsageStatsManager).
• Living tiles: each tile shows the latest notification's image — chat photo, album art, large icon — falling back to the app logo shown tile- sized (centred, undistorted) when there is no image (NotificationListenerService).
• Red star on a tile when that app has something new; cleared on launch.
• Optional real app photos: with the accessibility service enabled, a tile can show a real screenshot of the app's last state (true Active-Frames look). Apps that block screenshots (banking, BBMe) show their logo instead of a black tile. Images stay on the device only, in persistent app storage — so they survive an OS update / cache clear / SD Maid (they used to live in the cache and vanished).
• Permissions section: a collapsible list in the settings shows each permission, what it is for and its status, with a jump to the matching system setting; the saved tile images can be cleared there. If a once-granted permission goes missing (e.g. the accessibility service after an OS update), Active Frames reminds you with a notification offering to re-grant or ignore.
• Second, native widget for EdgeTab ("Widget 2"): an "Active Frames" card inside EdgeTab's edge panel that reads its data (order, stars, images) from Active Frames over a private, EdgeTab- only content provider — so EdgeTab needs no extra permissions, and because EdgeTab draws the tiles itself, that card scrolls reliably even on older launchers.
• Backup & restore of all settings and the tile images as a single Zip file (via the system file dialog) – after restoring, the tiles are filled again right away.
• No ads, no analytics, no billing, no internet permission.

Scrolling note / Hinweis zum Scrollen

The home-screen widget's optional scrolling mode uses an Android RemoteViews collection. On most launchers it works; on some older ones (e.g. the BlackBerry Launcher) collection tiles could previously swap image/name. That is fixed by sending small per-tile bitmaps (the same approach BlackBerry's own Hub widget uses) instead of content:// image URIs. If you still see glitches on an unusual launcher, turn scrolling off — the fixed grid with variable row heights is always correct — or use "Widget 2" inside EdgeTab, which scrolls natively.

The honest limitation

True per-app screen snapshots (BlackBerry's actual live frames) are not available to a non-system app on Android — only the system launcher, bound to SystemUI over privileged interfaces, can read TaskSnapshots, and no launcher exposes them to other apps. The notification image is the closest feasible substitute (and is what commercial equivalents use, too).

Documentation / Dokumentation

• English: User guide · Flyer
• Deutsch: Anleitung · Werbung

Building

No Gradle — built directly with the raw Android SDK command-line tools. You need platforms;android-34, build-tools;34.0.0, platform-tools, a JDK (11+), and your own signing keystore (none is included).

SDK=/path/to/android/sdk
BT="$SDK/build-tools/34.0.0"
AJAR="$SDK/platforms/android-34/android.jar"

rm -rf build && mkdir -p build/gen build/obj
"$BT/aapt2" compile --dir res -o build/res.zip
"$BT/aapt2" link -o build/base.apk -I "$AJAR" --manifest AndroidManifest.xml \
  --java build/gen -R build/res.zip -A assets --auto-add-overlay \
  --min-sdk-version 29 --target-sdk-version 34
javac --release 11 -d build/obj -cp "$AJAR" $(find src build/gen -name '*.java')
"$BT/d8" --min-api 29 --lib "$AJAR" --output build/ $(find build/obj -name '*.class')
cp build/base.apk build/unsigned.apk && (cd build && zip -qj unsigned.apk classes*.dex)
"$BT/zipalign" -f -p 4 build/unsigned.apk build/aligned.apk
"$BT/apksigner" sign --ks keystore.p12 --ks-pass pass:YOURPASS --ks-key-alias YOURALIAS \
  --out build/ActiveFrames.apk build/aligned.apk

License

GNU General Public License v3.0 (or later) — see LICENSE.