mrambossekandClaude Opus 5
d65dbbc75a
Diagnosing a tablet that claimed "no internet" took twenty adb commands to establish something the app should have said in one run: ping to 1.1.1.1 worked, the configured DNS server answered a raw UDP query in 65 bytes, and Android still could not resolve a hostname. The network was fine; netd had wedged. Those two failures look identical to a user and want opposite responses — "look at your router" against "toggle your wifi" — so dns.resolver asks the network's own servers directly and compares the answer against what the platform returns for the same name. The query is hand-rolled over a plain DatagramSocket on purpose: anything routed through a resolver API would inherit the very fault being looked for. dns.system_resolver_broken fires only on the pairing that is otherwise unattributable: server answered, platform did not. Per network, because a phone can have wedged wifi and working cellular at once. Also records Android's own verdict per network — validated, captive portal, partial connectivity — which the app reproduced with its own HTTP probes but never stored. It is free, it is what the user sees in the status bar, and its disagreement with our measurements is exactly what identified the tablet. NET_CAPABILITY_PARTIAL_CONNECTIVITY is @SystemApi so the constant is inlined with its rationale, in the manner of OsAbi.kt, and read defensively enough to report unknown rather than false. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Echolot
Free software for detecting and debugging local network issues from an Android phone — built for people who actually know what a neighbor table is.
Most "wifi analyzer" apps show you signal bars. Echolot aims at the layer where home and office networks actually break: duplicate DHCP servers, broken IPv6 RAs, MTU black holes, NAT64 weirdness, multicast that dies at the AP, DNS that answers differently than it should. It records what it observed, separates observation from interpretation, and exports the whole run so you can argue with it later.
Status: pre-release. The capability prober runs on real hardware; the production app and the probe server are not built yet.
Repository layout
docs/ design docs — the contract for everything below
echolot-prober/ capability prober: validates the no-root feasibility matrix on real devices
The Go probe server and the production app land here as siblings.
Design docs
The three specs are draft-complete and reviewed; treat them as the contract.
| Doc | What it defines |
|---|---|
| docs/feature-catalog-and-feasibility.md | Full feature list + the no-root feasibility matrix |
| docs/measurement-schema.md | Archived/exportable measurement JSON (observation vs finding, two-clock rule, anonymization) |
| docs/probe-protocol.md | Client↔server wire protocol (pinned TLS control plane, binary UDP data plane, STUN, canary DNS) |
| docs/build-status.md | Running log of decisions and next steps |
Privilege tiers
Every result records which tier produced it:
app— no root, no special setup. The bulk of the functionality.shizuku— ADB-shell privileges via wireless pairing, no root. Shipped in v1.root— future optional module.
Licensing
| Part | License | Why |
|---|---|---|
| All code (app, prober, server) | GPL-3.0-or-later | The value here is the platform-API research; copyleft keeps derivative apps free |
docs/ (the specs) |
CC-BY-4.0 | A wire protocol and a measurement format should be implementable by anyone, without license anxiety |
Full texts: LICENSE (GPLv3) and docs/LICENSE (CC BY 4.0).
Sources carry SPDX-License-Identifier headers.
If you want to build a compatible server or client, the protocol and schema docs are deliberately permissive — go ahead.
Building
See echolot-prober/README.md. Short version, from echolot-prober/:
echo "sdk.dir=/path/to/Android/sdk" > local.properties
./gradlew :app:assembleDebug