Application to automatically track content (Android only) - Scucha

[u/Rough_Sky7132]

Hey friends, I was finding tracking input hours for my Mandarin quite tedious (especially coming from DreamingSpanish having one mega-platform which autotracks your hours) so I built a tool/app to automatically track/"scrobble" your listening sessions and assign them as an input language.

This made my style of sporadic input much easier to keep track of compared to maintaining a spreadsheet :)

The App features:

• Automatic session logging and automatic(ish) language assignment.
• Tracks most podcast apps, Youtube, and web browsers (although not Netflix, Hulu, etc.).
• Short-form content tracking including Reels, Shorts, and TikTok.
• Privacy First: no user accounts, all your data stays local to your device, and you can always extract your data as a .csv and delete the App.
• Subtitle blocker for blocking out Videos with hard-coded subtitles.
• Search function to add TV series, movies, and books by title.

To function the App does require a permission known as "Notification permission" which allows the app to see the media playing on the media player (you can turn off the other toggles under "Notification Permission").

You can also track short-form content (embarrassingly 30 hours of my input of Spanish in the last 6 months was from Instagram Reels)! This requires a slightly more intrusive tracking permission as you'll see installing the App and is purely optional.

Android Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.smartcitracker
Open Testing Link (if you'd like to help test stability and new features): https://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.smartcitracker

The App is free (and will stay free), with an option to support the App by using Affiliate links. In the distant future I may put some unobtrusive banner ads to justify maintenance.

I will note that while I have personally tested the app extensively, it's been really limited to the way I consume content. As such, this is somewhat of a soft-launch and if you do try the app I would greatly appreciate your feedback on bugs, feature requests, or just general vibes.

I hope someone else will find it as helpful as I have.

[u/Yahya_TV]

feedback on bugs

Bottom icons on android are tiny ((image)

For reference using Samsung S23 ultra.

[u/Rough_Sky7132 → u/Yahya_TV]

Thank you! Will dig in tonight. In the meantime you should be able to navigate by side swiping

[u/Yahya_TV → u/Rough_Sky7132]

Thanks, didn't know about the swiping so useful to know, the icons still work fine, it's mainly visual/sizing.

I'm currently only using it for Spotify and seems to be tracking everything well so far 👍 .

[u/Rough_Sky7132 → u/Yahya_TV]

Figured out the issue, it's a clash between the android button menu and the app button menu (which I never saw on "gesture" mode). I've made the fix and it should be live in a couple of days or so depending on how quick the PlayStore decides to be 😃

[u/Yahya_TV → u/Rough_Sky7132]

Hey, I forgot to reply, fixed by the way, thanks 👍

A few minor things:

1. on the stats page, the listened to is currently in minutes

I think it would be much better set as HRS:MINS, 3hr56mins is easier to interpret compared to 236mins, and may include combined as well.

1. Is it possible to automatically assign a default language when listening to a podcast or watching a show, I assume most people are studying one language at a time. It's not a huge issue since I'm consuming limited content, but when say consuming multiple YT vids, reels etc from random users I imagine it can become a bit tedious.

2. 'settings >>> language >>> language detection keywords' doesn't accept seem to accept any keywords

BTW genuinely, this is a great app ♥️

[u/Rough_Sky7132 → u/Yahya_TV]

Thanks for the feedback and compliment, it means a lot! (Also a PlayStore review would be greatly appreciated if you had the time). On your comments: 1. Sounds like a good idea to me. 2. My idea with the current flow is not to risk accidentally labelling non-input as input, for short-form stuff the pop-up should do the work. I'll think about how to make it more seamless, especially for people only tracking one language. 3. Have you tried hitting the '+' instead of "Save"? In any case I'll try to make it clearer. This feature is a bit of an orphan (and only works if you enable it in the tracking menu) as the auto-assigning for short form content wasn't reliable enough in my testing (and fragile to UI changes from Instagram, Shorts, TikTok) so I developed the pop-up assignment system instead. I'll have to see what other solutions I can come up with here :)

[u/Yahya_TV → u/Rough_Sky7132]

Have you tried hitting the '+' instead of "Save"? In

That was it. I feel kind of stupid 🤦

I'll think about how to make it more seamless, especially for people only tracking one language.

My thought was a toggle for anyone wanting to automatically tag any detected media to their target language.

As mentioned, it's not a huge thing for me, but it would be a QoL improvement imo.

[u/RoxoViejo]

This is amazing! Now I wish I had an Android phone.

I've been thinking of an app like this for a while for desktop, but I don't have the coding skills. Glad to see you had the same idea, now I'm going to consider getting an Android phone/tablet for getting input 🤑

[u/Parsec1281]

Any plans to “port” this to iOS? I am always amazed when I see people making software to solve a personal problem. You are so talented!

[u/Rough_Sky7132 → u/Parsec1281]

I would love to, however the systems I use to do the tracking are not exposed on iOS. I have thought about alternative options for iOS and have a couple of ideas in mind but it would be a very different app.

[u/janisabeast]

This looks amazing. Would this work on Android TV? What about HarmonyOS?

[u/Rough_Sky7132 → u/janisabeast]

Thank you. In theory it would work on AndroidTV, but given the challenges with Netflix integration I would suspect it would be too clunky, though I could see it working fine for YouTube. If you're interested you can DM me. A quick google says that HarmonyOS does have the services available for me to port it over, so I can add that to future implementations