A handy new Android memory superpower

Tell me if this sounds familiar: You stumble onto something scintillating during your various digital dalliances — something you think might be a useful nugget of knowledge for work or maybe even a pertinent update for your personal life.

Maybe it’s in an article you encounter somewhere online — in your browser, in a news app of some sort, in your Google Discover feed. Maybe it’s something someone mentioned to you in Slack or in Google Messages. Maybe it’s something someone emailed you or posted onto LinkedIn. With all the places we all bounce between these days, who the hell can remember?

And there’s the rub: When that moment arises that your battered ol’ butter-brain comes back to the thing in question, you inevitably won’t remember where exactly you saw it — or what exactly it was called, for that matter. You’ll dance from app to app trying to retrace your steps and rediscover where and how you’d encountered whatever it was that’s on your tip of your amygdala but not quite coming through. And no matter where you look or what words you search for, somehow, the right thing never seems to resurface.

We’ve all been there — some of us more than others (insert awkwardly self-aware eye-darting here). So what if there were some sort of magic-seeming system that’d quietly observe all our online wanderings, take private notes about everything we’re seeing, and make it impossibly easy to retrace those steps and find anything we encountered along the way, no matter where it was or in what context we first saw it?

My friend and fellow mushy-brained mammal, have I got just the treat for you.

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Your Android recall advantage

Oh ye Android-appreciating animal, allow me to introduce you to a crafty little creation called Snapseek.

Snapseek is a simple Android app that’s similar on the surface to Microsoft’s eternally under-development Windows Recall feature — only as an optional external add-on, the privacy worries surrounding it seems far less pronounced (and the app provides plenty of assurances about how it protects you, too).

In short, Snapseek runs quietly in the background of your favorite Android device and works to capture frequent behind-the-scenes screenshots of everything you’re doing, in whichever apps you select for it to follow. Each screenshot gets saved only locally, on your device and within the app itself, with on-the-fly optical character recognition to process all the visible words and make ’em easily searchable later.

The result is a virtual breadcrumb trail of all your online meanderings in whichever areas you authorize. You can browse through that history anytime — or, in the especially useful memory advantage, you can simply search for any word imaginable and see an instant list of every screen you interacted with where that specific term appeared.

Snapseek lets you search through all of your Android activity in any apps where it’s active.JR Raphael, Foundry

Critically, Snapseek looks only at apps that you ask it to monitor — something you select when you first set up the app and can easily adjust later.

It’s up to you to decide exactly which apps Snapseek watches and makes available for future searching.JR Raphael, Foundry

Out of the box, the free version of Snapseek lets you select up to two apps for ongoing following. And it’s perfectly functional for those two apps, with no other asterisks or limitations.

If you want to be able to create memory trails for more than two apps, you’ll have to make a one-time $4 upgrade to the app’s pro version. That’s it — just the one-time $4 charge, with no subscriptions or ongoing payments.

An optional $4 upgrade unlocks Snapseek’s two-app limitation.JR Raphael, Foundry

To emphasize a key factor here: Snapseek stores all of its data only locally on your own device. It doesn’t collect any manner of private info or share any personal data in any way. There are no ads or trackers involved in the app. You can require biometric authentication to protect your history from prying eyes, and you can tell Snapseek to automatically delete all of the screenshots it saves every seven, 14, 30, or 90 days, if you don’t want your history to stick around forever.

It’s an interesting way to enhance your memory and give yourself a sleek, swift, ‘n’ simple new searching superpower — one that’s bound to be a lifesaver the next time you know you saw something significant but can’t for the life of you remember where or what it was.

Erm, right. What were we talking about, again?

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