App Quarantine In-depth Review & Exclusive Interview

Hello, in today’s first ever app review, we are going to take a look at a new app “App Quarantine“. It is developed by Ronald Ammann aka Ramdroid. We also got a chance to go one on one with him. More about that at the end of the article.

Whenever you buy a new phone it comes bundled with a lot of unnecessary & redundant apps. This has a lot of disadvantages.

• They take up a lot of internal memory.
• They clutter the app drawer.
• They might take a lot of system resources with background services.
• They interfere with your default app. Suppose you have 2 music apps. A stock one that came bundled & one you downloaded. Every time you click for something music related, system will ask which default app you want to use unless you fix the defaults.

So many users like to root and remove these apps. Others remain in a confused state of mind since they might need the app in future or they haven’t made up their mind yet!!

Enter App Quarantine.
With this app, you can move unwanted apps into quarantine. The quarantined apps will stop running and disappear from a user’s app launcher. You can no longer launch the app, and all of its background services are disabled. If you want to restore an app from the quarantine you can just “unfreeze” and the app will appear again in you launcher and run normally.

Features:

• Disable apps with one click
  Ever wondered why the Paypal app is always running in the background after startup and you don’t even use it? Throw it into quarantine and you’re sure no unwanted background service is running because the app is completely disabled.
• Easy restore
  Safely restore your apps anytime without any loss of settings.
• Widget support
  Enable or disable apps directly from your homescreen.
• Honeycomb support
  On Android 3.0 devices with extra large screens you will also see an improved user interface in APP QUARANTINE to show more information about particular apps.
• Compatibility with Over-the-air (OTA) updates
  When using other tools to remove system apps then you possibly can’t update your ROM updates any longer. This is no issue with APP QUARANTINE. The system partition is never changed, there’s no permanent change to the system.
• Update Quarantined apps
  Users can also set up App Quarantine to automatically quarantine the app again after the app is updated. This is a great feature if you like to unlock quarantined apps periodically, and want to make sure that you have the latest version of the app on your Android smartphone.
• Custom Roms?
  App Quarantine stores all settings on your SD card. The first time you run the app after a factory reset (or flashing a custom ROM) you can quickly re-quarantine all selected apps with one click.
• Works with Soft Root
  Many users don’t want to permantely root their phones. If your phones supports one time soft-root, even then you can use the app. After a reboot, root will be lost but your apps will remain in quarantine.

Hands on with the app:
As soon as you open the app, its straight business. You will be presented with a list of apps from which you can multi-select apps to be put into quarantine. Hit up menu key, select lock & reboot & voila!! You’re done. Scrolling & animations are fluid and smooth. We are highly impressed by the App’s UI & responsiveness.
And if that isn’t fast, you can filter your selection too.

The settings screen provide some useful options.

Its very easy to add a widget for any particular app. Add a new widget from homescreen & you will be presented with a list of apps to select from, for quick access. Though this feature can use some polishing. Widgets took quite much space & can’t be resized. Also there is no way to add multiple apps to a same widget.

One question will come naturally to your mind: Why shouldn’t I delete the apps altogether? What are the advantages of freezing over deleting?

• OTA updates won’t be possible if you delete the apps
• Sometimes you might haven’t made your mind about some app at first look. So it is better to freeze it than to uninstall it.
• Suppose your favorite messaging app gets updated. It might have some deal-breaking features in the current version & you might want to wait for the developer to fix them in the next. Simply put the app in quarantine for that period.

Wait a minute, doesn’t freezing sound like hiding?

• While hiding will simply remove an app from app drawer, freezing will not only hide it from the app drawer but also disable it from hogging system resources.

Since smartphones don’t have unlimited memory i.e. RAM (yet!) but some do have a lot of internal storage, we think that with this app the developer ramdroid has struck the chord & the app has a huge potential. And since Android Market doesn’t supplies offline install setups, freezing makes sense instead of installing. This app is going to go places & we will do well to follow it!

So final words:
App quarantine is an indispensable must-have tool for an advanced users, those who like to try a lot of apps and those who have phones with large internal storage. Users with smartphones having little internal memory might prefer uninstalling over freezing but since the app takes a meager ~225kb after install, they will like having it at their disposal.  Whats more, it’s free!!

We also got a chance to interview ramdroid.  Interview with Ramdroid.

Here is the market link.

Dev’s website