A new feature called Recall has set off the Internet’s concern about personal privacy in the age of AI PCs. From the concept, realization to the design of specific features, Microsoft’s “Recall” feature is quite similar to Rewind on macOS platform, which we introduced earlier, and before Microsoft, there were enthusiastic developers who made alternative products such as “Catch Wind Recorder” for Windows platform. What about Android? If you want to have a similar tool on your Android device, Snapseek should be the best choice right now. Simply open Snapseek, type the keyword Recall into the search box, and you’ll find what you’re looking for.
Although it’s inevitable to have to deal with accessibility, background running, foreground services, and other “high-risk” permissions to realize this feature on Android, Snapseek does a passable job of handling private data: screenshots are stored locally, OCR recognition is based on a local model, and networking is limited to Google Play checkout system verification.
Most importantly, unlike Rewind and Recall, which use the idea of recording everything and manually excluding exceptions, Snapseek is set up in the exact opposite way – you have to manually select specific apps in order to enable screenshot recording. Although it’s essentially a back-and-forth approach, with occasional range overflow due to the speed of Android’s accessibility (e.g., the notification center in the photo above), I personally approve of Snapseek’s approach to experience and perception. Snapseek’s only current in-app purchase is also set up here. Users of the free version can only select two apps for recording, and to expand the recording range, you’ll need $3.99 to unlock the premium version.
Unlike the Windows ‘recall’ feature for most Chromium browsers, Snapseek’s support for browser links and app deep-linking is still very limited. For example, if you choose to record in your browser, Snapseek will fetch the link to the corresponding page based on the accessibility of the screen content reading function, so that we can click on the link to jump back to the corresponding page when indexing the relevant content – the disadvantage of this implementation is naturally very obvious, if you browse when the address bar If the address bar is hidden for any reason when you browse, Snapseek won’t be able to catch the link.
Trying to jump to the app’s corresponding screen via a recorded screenshot is also a non-starter. There may be better solutions to both of these problems, such as Pixel Launcher’s ability to automatically extract hyperlinks to some pages for sharing in the multitasking interface, but it’s not clear if the API behind it is currently open to third parties.
In addition, Snapseek’s current indexing settings are a bit confusing. For example, the “Text Recognition” option in the app’s settings supports Spanish, Japanese, Korean, and Latin recognition, and only supports single-selection, but I tested it in both Spanish and English, and found that it didn’t seem to be a big deal no matter what language images were set, and that searching in both Spanish and English yielded the results you were looking for.
In terms of AI, in the just updated version, Snapseek added a screen function based on Gemini API, and the setup guide is simple and easy to understand, but the usage effect is limited by the availability of Gemini API, and the visual and interactive experience is relatively general; in contrast, I would prefer to see natural semantic search based on the local model of Gemini Nano on Snapseek in the future. In contrast, I’d like to see natural semantic search based on Gemini Nano’s local model on Snapseek in the future, after all, the expression “Hey, I saw a blah blah blah content before” is more in line with our retrieval instinct.
Finally, while Snapseek keeps taking screenshots of our selected apps in the background, the app’s settings offer the option to save them as grayscale images, and you can manually select the screenshot resolution and duration, so there shouldn’t be much pressure on storage space on mainstream Android devices.
As for power consumption, I don’t want to dwell on it here. The developer reports an average daily consumption of 5%, and I’ve tested overnight standby with little additional power consumption despite keeping it running in the background.