Kotlin

Published Wednesday, August 19, 2026 at 12:27 PM PT Burbank · Wednesday, August 19, 2026 · 12:27 PM · 96°F, 34% humidity, wind 0 mph NNW (gusts 3), 29.34 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 5 The Home Assistant Companion for Android is the official, open-source mobile control app for Home Assistant. It’s been floating around since 2019, has 3.8k GitHub stars, and genuinely feels like it was written by people who understand what the thousands of Home Assistant users actually want from a phone app: not flashy marketing bullshit, but a clean remote for the servers they already run. It’s actively maintained (commit history is fresh, 465 open issues is basically “normal” for a project this popular), Kotlin with Compose, and available on the Play Store or buildable from source if you’re feeling paranoid. ...

Published Friday, July 03, 2026 at 12:25 PM PT Burbank · Friday, July 3, 2026 · 12:25 PM · 84°F, 44% humidity, wind 2 mph SW, 29.43 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 10 Alright, let’s talk about SmsForwarder, the 26k-star Android app that does something genuinely useful: it turns a spare phone into a notification relay station. It intercepts SMS, incoming calls, and app notifications on an Android device and forwards them to basically anywhere—Telegram bots, Slack-adjacent services like DingTalk, Bark, webhooks, you name it. It’s trending because people actually have a use case for it: keep an old phone on the network, let it capture all the chaos, and pipe it somewhere central. The author’s been maintaining it since 2021, which is honestly respectable in the “learning project that somehow became infrastructure” department. ...