Overview
App Tracker is a tool for organizing your apps based on usage history. It maintains a running tally of which apps you use the most and how recently you invoked them. Using this, you can set up widgets that display your favorite apps, recently used apps, recently installed apps, etc.Homescreen Widget
To invoke the widget, long-press on the homescreen, choose "Widgets," then choose "App Tracker," and then set the configuration options. Feel free to put multiple widgets on the same screen.Standalone Application
The standalone app allows you to view all tracked applications and sort them by different statistics. You can also exclude, launch, or uninstall apps in the main list by touching them. To manage your excluded apps (for instance, commonly used apps like the Dialer and Browser), hit Menu, Settings, and then Apps to Exclude.Sorting
App Tracker offers six ways to sort your data - Recently Used, Most Used, Rarely Used, Recently Installed, Recently Updated, and Flavor of the Week. Most are pretty intuitive, but Flavor of the Week merits some explanation. Flavor of the Week can be thought of as a balance between Recent and Most Used. Basically, an app's score is initially based on its number of hits, but its score starts to "decay" the longer you don't use it. You can also think of it as a kind of "Billboard Top 100" view. Using the Time Decay Constant setting, you can dial up or down how fast app scores decay. Lower values mean they decay more quickly. If you're curious about how it works, here is the update function that gets periodically applied to the scores: update(s) = s*e(t'-t)/(-c*86400000) ...where update() is the update function, s is the score, t' is the current time (in milliseconds), t is the time of the last update, c is the decay constant, and 86400000 is the number of milliseconds in a day. The default decay constant is 7, meaning that an app that was accessed 7 days ago will have its score decay to about 1/e (~0.3679). Hence, "Flavor of the Week."FAQs
What's with the notification?App Tracker uses a lightweight background process to monitor app usage. However, the Android system tends to be hostile to background processes unless they have an associated notification. So if you disable the notification, Android might occasionally kill the process without giving it a chance to recover. This would cause App Tracker to stop tracking until a scheduled restart.
This situation mostly applies to older phones with limited resources, though. So if you have a high-end Android device (Droid, EVO, N1, etc.), then you can probably get away with disabling the notification. But if you're not sure, I recommend leaving it on.
Why don't the widget icons align with the native icons?If you look at the additional information that has to be fit into the widget (like the navigation buttons and the app subtext), you'll see that there's no way to make the icons line up with the native ones.
And even if the user chooses to hide that information, it can't work consistently across all Android phones. Different Android phones have different Launcher apps (e.g. Google vs. HTC, HelixLauncher vs. Cyanogen), so there's no way (AFAIK) to make a widget that will exactly fit all of them.