WOT Android app

The unofficial WOT Android app

Forum discussion as announced on March 4th 2015

All APK versions: http://tapandtrust.co.uk or http://tapandtrust.uk

Tap&Trust is an unofficial WOT Android app.

The application works for the native Android browser and Google Chrome. The app works with a service [1] which listens to the live browser history (since version V1.1.0. The old mechanism to catch URLs was replaced due to interferences with native browser: V1.0.9 and older). When a page is visited, the service is notified and retrieves the rating of the domain with the WOT API. If the visited site is considered "unsafe" (depending of the settings) a warning popup will be displayed (left capture), and on the other case, a small bottom message will display the rating for the trustworthiness and child safety (right capture, the messages can be hidden in the settings).

Customize parameters

In the settings page, several parameters can be customized:

- Minimum trustworthiness: The minimum required to consider the site as safe. Custom values are: Excellent, good, unsatisfactory, poor, very poor or disable. The default value is "good".

- Minimum child safety: This parameter works like the trustworthiness. It acts as a parental control.

- Sites with unknown ratings can be blocked (default value: false).

- The safe bottom messages can be disable (default value: false).

- Search engines: Allow to choose a search engine for the safe search. Available search engines are: Google, Yandex, Yahoo, Bing and Baidu.

- Prompt browsers: If enable, a list of browsers will be displayed to open the URLs from the safe search.

- Browsers: Allow to choose a browser by default to open results from the safe search. Browsers will be automatically picked-up from the device.

Safe search

When the app starts, it shows the safe search UI [2]. The search engine depends of that defined in the settings.

Searches can be done with the keyboard or the voice input. Results will be displayed in rows and at the top, arrows allow to browse from page to page. Also, some details will be displayed at the top: the search query, the search engine and the page number.

Each result will display two circles: the left circle is related to the trustworthiness rating and the right circle to the child safety rating. A click on an unsafe result (depending of the settings) will be rejected.

One other thing, clicks are no longer tracked as they are absolute URLs pointing to the site (ie: not a redirection from the search engine pointing to the site)

Permissions required

- The app runs a service which needs to be started when the device finishes booting, that is why the permission "RECEIVE_BOOT_COMPLETED" [3] is used.

- The app will work with the browser history, so the permission "READ_HISTORY_BOOKMARKS" [4] is needed.

- Finally, the app needs an Internet access to query the WOT API. So the last permission is "INTERNET" [5]