Pretty much everything about Android OS fascinated me much as a kid. I wanted to know its ins and outs. Back then, the highest version available was Android 2.3. Mine was 2.1 then, and there was actually a great gap between 2.3 and 2.1.
Not sure if there was ever 2.2, but that's not even the point today. It's about one particular app that somehow appears in every Android phone, but I can bet no one uses it. Not anymore, as far as I know.
You probably don't know that there's such an app called the SIM Tool Kit. If you know it, then perhaps you have tried deleting it to free up space only to discover that you couldn't. Well, it apparently is one way to interact with your SIM card and your network operator. But everyone used USSD instead, so who would care?
Another thing that makes the app very redundant, especially in these times that devices have greatly advanced over the years, is that it is primitive and stuck in the past.
The same way the app looked like when I got my first Android phone in 2010, thereabout, is the same exact way it looks now. Back then, it wasn't entirely useless, sort of. We didn't have as many USSD codes as we do now, so you could check airtime and data balance there. Sadly, the experience wasn't smooth then, and it still isn't now.
When you open it, you only find the networks available on the SIM cards on your phone. Whichever you select takes you through some options that allow you to do some things like check your airtime balance and access some internet services.
This app may appear convenient if you think about the loading times when using USSD, but the thing is that most of the available options are outdated. In fact, they don't work. Airtime balance that you'd think is the simplest command, nothing happens.
Remember Blackberry, that popular phone back then? Well, somehow it still has data plans for it in 2024. Interestingly, the plans still work. But what I found are plans that are too expensive now. Thinking about it, these network providers really took a lot of money from us for internet services back then. 1,000 naira can buy 5GB of data now, depending on your network, but it would only give you 1.5GB then.
I normally do not keep apps that are totally useless to me. But then again, Android phones always come with certain pre-installed apps that you just cannot remove. They would just be there on your phone, doing nothing and occupying space. The SIM Tool Kit app is just one of them, but I think I find it to be the most useless of them all. It's not even fine...
Some of the features work, apparently, like the games section. But I can imagine that there is zero traffic there. The games I found were, let's say, something kids of these days wouldn't even play, at least on Airtel. I didn't check for MTN, but I assume they are all the same on every network provider if they have such.
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