Material You has made its way into many Google apps, but other big apps are still reluctant to add it, possibly fearing a dilution of their brand. Luckily, smaller indie developers are much more excited about Google’s new design paradigm, with the likes of Sync for Reddit, Inware, and Tasker already coming in your wallpaper’s color. App manager Skit is the latest third-party app to bring some Material You magic to its interface, along with a slew of new features.
If you’re not familiar with Skit, it’s an app that allows you to view and manage all of your installed apps, giving you much more granular information about them than what the system itself would offer you. You can see when you’ve installed or updated apps, how much storage and memory they use, how long you’ve used them, which permissions they have, and you have the option to extract apps as APKs.
Despite his home country under Russian attack, Pavel Rekun has released a big 3.0 open beta update for his app management and information app. The headlining change is probably the addition of Material You, with the app pulling its color scheme from your wallpaper if you run Android 12 on a device that supports Google’s new automated color extraction engine. The implementation is solid, with all parts of the app easily legible in a variety of color options, making Skit feel right at home on a phone packed with Google apps. The developer has even added a themed icon to make Skit fit in with the Google apps on your home screen on Android 13.
The release is also a nod to Google’s newfound interest in tablets. The developer writes that optimizing the app for tablets and other big screen devices like foldables and Chromebooks was a big priority, and the effort looks to have paid off. On bigger screens, installed apps are now listed in a grid format rather than a list, making much better use of the space. The bottom bar also moves to the side, and many parts of the app are redesigned to offer a multi-column view.
As for feature updates, Skit 3.0 gives a better idea of which permissions are potentially dangerous and which are usually harmless. While the app separates “dangerous” and “normal” permissions pretty harshly, keep in mind that most apps that request access actually need these to function in full capacity and usually don’t have anything nefarious in mind when they ask for them.
To get deeper into the weeds, Skit 3.0 also experiments with an option to always force the extraction of regular APKs rather than split APKS files that tend to cause headaches when you want to install them. The developer notes that this might not always work, though, as the base APK might sometimes miss critical components that are saved to one of the split files. To offer another workaround, Skit 3.0 now also offers the option to install APKS files natively, leading to a seamless experience when you run into an APKS file for installation. Note that former Android Police sister site APK Mirror uses its own split APK file format (.apkm), so you won’t be able to use Skit to install split APKs from this source.
Skit is by far not the only option out there for managing apps, but since its launch in 2019, it has quickly made a name for itself as one of the most beautiful and easy-to-use options that doesn’t add unnecessary bells and whistles. Skit also has a fair revenue model with a completely free basic app with no ads and a $1.99 premium version with comfort features like detailed statistics and the option to delete and extract multiple apps at once. The strategy seems to pay off, as the app has amassed more than 100,000 downloads by now.