DroidconUK’s Droidcon2gether Hackathon Weekend Recap

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Following this year’s DroidconUK 2017, Droidcon and Skills Matter organised the Droidcon2gether Weekend at Code Node in London, a Hackathon event. XDA-Developers ran one of the main Hackathon events, which was the challenge to create a Xposed module. The teams then went to work over the two days with a little over 24 hours until the winners were to be crowned and the prizes, some Sony XZ Premium’s and Honor 6X’s from HonorUK, to be given out. The attendees quickly got to work on some of the awesome ideas listed below:

The Ideas at Droidcon2gether

Parental Controls

Two groups took on this idea, where the objectives were relatively simple. The ideas being that with a hook into the browser on the device, the Xposed module could block certain websites from loading, or only allow websites on a whitelist. What’s more, the module would only allow certain apps to run for a certain length of time each day. Two groups tore off on this route with the challenge.

Virtual Sensor

This idea was interesting, where a user could feed fake gyroscopic data to applications through a Xposed module if their device either doesn’t have a gyroscope or you want to spoof that. This could be used to allow a user to enjoy VR on lower end devices or spoof the data for it either. There are also other uses including turning the screen, using an external gyroscope and more.

Camera Quirks

The simplicity of this module is what made it so cool. Hooking into the camera, this module allows the user to do a few things, including crash the camera, make the camera throw an exception or flip the camera output. The purpose here would be to allow for forcing the camera into a certain state to see how the applications handled it and what the user experience was.

A/B Testing Enabling

Another simple app, and similar to the idea behind the Twitter A/B testing enabler Xposed module which we covered this month, this was an idea to create a Xposed module to enable various A/B tested features across a wide range of applications, not just targetted at one or two.

Coloured Nav Bar Timer

The idea behind this was that after five minutes, the nav bar on the device would begin to blink a certain colour at the user, and then after ten minutes would begin to blink faster.

Winners of Droidcon2gether 2017

First Place Joint Winners – Camera Quirks & A/B Testing Module

Both of the first place winners were working alone and were the creators of the camera quirks module and the A/B testing module. The camera quirks module worked perfectly, and the A/B testing module had a sound concept with some implementation of the idea. Not only that, it came with an excellent presentation. Both won a Sony Xperia XZ Premium for their efforts!

Second Place Winners – Parental Controls

For an excellent presentation and a somewhat working implementation of the idea, the team behind one of the parental control modules won second place. Their Xposed module worked for counting the amount of time the application was running, and the code behind closing the app was sound. The only problem was that they could not figure out how to use their application to communicate back to the app to shut it down – but were committed to figuring it out and implementing the idea. All three won a brand new Honor 6X, supplied to us by Honor UK!

Droidcon2gether

That concludes Droidcon2gether 2017! You can check out our recaps of Droidcon Day 1 and Day 2, and make plans to see us next year at DroidconUK, October 25-26, 2018.

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