ActivityWatch for Android 0.14 is out of beta. It’s the first stable Android release since v0.12.1 in 2023, and the biggest one the app has had: 30 new features, 100 bug fixes, and contributions from 32 people. Since v0.14.0 (Sept 13), two follow-ups, v0.14.1 and v0.14.2, have gone out to tighten things up.

The first Android release in nearly three years is mostly a stability release, so we’ll start there.

Crashes and performance

  • Startup hangs. A slow datastore used to turn app start into a hang. Startup paths are now hardened (#262).
  • StackOverflowError in the watcher. Accessibility tree traversal is now bounded, so devices with deep view hierarchies no longer blow the stack (#269).
  • Off-thread initialization. The Rust interface is constructed off the calling thread instead of blocking it (#277).
  • Rotation. Rotating your phone no longer reloads the WebView and throws away the view you were on (#271).
  • Onboarding. MainActivity now relaunches correctly once onboarding finishes (#298).

Sync with your desktop

Your phone’s data can now flow into the same reports as your desktop. Turn on Sync in the navigation drawer and choose a folder that Syncthing, Dropbox, Drive, or another file-sync tool shares with your desktop’s ~/ActivityWatchSync folder. Then run aw-sync sync on the desktop to import the phone’s buckets. aw-sync does not transport the files itself, and the default daemon does not yet support Android’s folder layout; see the setup notes.

As of 0.14.2 the app also shows when the next sync is scheduled and what each sync pass actually did, so “why isn’t my phone data showing up?” now has an answer in the UI.

Alerts, widget, browser tracking

  • Activity alerts (via aw-notify): get notified when you’ve spent too long in a category.
  • Home screen widget with category time, refreshed every five minutes.
  • Firefox and Chrome browser tracking.
  • Export to CSV/JSON through the share sheet now works reliably.
  • A Material You monochrome icon for Android 12+.

Get it

If something still breaks, open an issue. Thanks to everyone who reported problems during the beta, and to the contributors who fixed them.