Statlet

Live information in your Android status bar. No root, no custom ROM.

Statlet puts the numbers you actually check into the status bar: the outside temperature, how fast your connection is moving right now, how hot the phone is running. They sit next to the clock and update on their own.

What it can show

Twenty icons, grouped by what they measure. Enable as many as you like, and hold a row and drag it to put them in the order you want.

Weather

All eight come from a single request every quarter of an hour — eight icons cost exactly what two did.

Sun and moon

Network

Battery

System and position

Charts

Statlet keeps what it measures. Every numeric value is written to the phone, at most once a minute, and the last two days are kept; the Charts tab draws them over one, six, twenty-four or forty-eight hours, with the lowest, average, highest and current figure under each line.

None of it leaves your phone, and switching a unit does not bend the past: readings are stored the way the sensor gives them and converted when they are drawn. One switch stops the recording and deletes what it recorded.

Alerts

Any icon showing a number can carry a threshold — above 45 °C, below 15%, above 1.5 GB of data. Crossing it gets you a notification, on a channel of its own, which is the one part of Statlet allowed to make a sound.

It notifies on the crossing rather than for as long as the condition holds, so a hot phone is one notification and not one every fifteen seconds. Repeating is a switch, and repeats at most once an hour.

Home screen widgets

Six sizes, and you can add as many of each as you like:

Each one shows a single value — or all of them at once — and refreshes on a schedule you pick, from half an hour to a day. They sample by themselves when the icons are stopped, so the home screen works even with the status bar left entirely alone, and what they sample is charted like anything else.

The network and GPS speeds are not offered there. Half an hour is the fastest Android lets a widget refresh itself, and a speed read an hour later describes a moment that has been over for an hour; those two stay status-bar icons, where they update every couple of seconds.

Or no icons at all

There is a mode that puts nothing in the status bar and writes every value into the notification instead. Pull the shade down and it is all there; the bar looks exactly as it would without the app.

How it works

Android has no API for drawing in the status bar. What does get drawn there is a notification’s small icon — so that is what Statlet uses. Every icon you enable is a silent, ongoing notification whose small icon the app redraws with the current value.

That is the whole mechanism, and it is why the app needs no root and no special privileges. It also means the icons play by the notification system’s rules:

Each icon gets its own notification channel, so any one of them can be muted or hidden from the system settings without touching the others.

Weather without an account

Weather comes from Open-Meteo, which needs no API key and no sign-up. If you prefer OpenWeatherMap, enter your own API key in the settings — it stays on your device, and Statlet ships none of its own.

Location is optional: grant approximate location, or just search for a city by name.

Honest about the limits. The icons are notifications, so their order follows the notification ranking, and some manufacturer skins rearrange them or cap how many an app may show. Without root there is no public API for CPU temperature, so the phone-temperature icon falls back to the battery sensor when the kernel keeps its thermal zones private — the notification always says which sensor answered.

Privacy in one paragraph

No advertising. There has never been an ad in any of my apps and there will not be one — not in the free version, not anywhere.

No account and no sign-up either. Your coordinates go to the weather service when a weather icon is enabled, and nothing else leaves the device unless you send it: a bug report, a name for the supporters list, or the optional crash reports and usage statistics — none of which ever includes what your icons measure. The full text is on the Privacy Policy page.

Get it

Statlet requires Android 6.0 or later. There are two builds, and they are the same app:

Google PlayStatlet on Google Play. Updates arrive by themselves. Statlet Pro is a monthly or a yearly subscription.

Direct download — a build with no Google Play Billing and no Firebase compiled into it at all. Every Pro feature is unlocked in it from the first run, since a build with no store has no purchase it could verify; a donation is what keeps it maintained. Whoever supports the app — donation or subscription, the two count the same — can choose to be named on the supporters page, under whatever name they like, and change their mind about either at any time.

It is published in an F-Droid repository of my own. Add this URL in F-Droid — or as a source in Obtainium, which reads the same repository and installs new versions as they appear:

https://releases.android.apps.gpm.name/repo

On a phone that already has F-Droid, this link adds the repository in one tap, fingerprint included.

Either way updates arrive on their own, checked against the repository signature. If you want to verify what you are adding, its fingerprint is:

C983 7356 6EEC 235E CEFB 7D29 A582 6367 4D80 B432 8699 2BCB 7ACB 3AA4 3CA3 C41E

This is a binary repository: I build and sign the APK, F-Droid only serves it. It is not part of f-droid.org, whose policy starts at published source.

Pick one and stay with it. Google Play re-signs the app with its own key, so Android treats the Play build and the direct download as two different apps that happen to share a name. Moving from one to the other means uninstalling first, which takes your settings with it.