AI-Assisted Creation Statement:

This article’s outline was generated by Gemini. I completed the content creation, and the article was polished by Gemini afterward. My personal writing isn’t great, so if you’re sensitive to AI-generated content, please accept my apologies!

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Introduction: “Network Speed Anxiety” and the “Bare-Bones House” of Stock Android

Friends who use Pixel phones or other near-stock Android systems are probably familiar with the joke about a “bare-bones house.” While we enjoy the purest Android experience, there are always some missing localized features that drive people crazy—and “real-time network speed display” is one of them.

In China’s complicated network environment, a speed indicator is almost a necessity for me. The awkward part is that Google seems to have never planned to support this feature at the system level. So we have no choice but to turn to third-party apps on the Google Play Store. However, after going through similar apps on the market—such as NetSpeed Indicator and Internet Speed Meter—I found that even in 2026, the experience is still far from satisfactory.

Most of these “veteran apps” have outdated UI designs. Many of their interfaces are stuck in the Android 4.4 era or the first generation of Material Design, and they always look out of place on modern Android systems. The actual speed display isn’t great either: it’s either a tiny status-bar icon with barely readable numbers and units, or a floating window plastered with the “display over other apps” permission reminder. Feature bloat is another problem—I just want a speed indicator, yet they often bundle in traffic statistics, detailed usage analysis, and a bunch of features I don’t need.

Most critically, they all share one fatal flaw: when a proxy tool is enabled, the reported network speed is wildly inflated. Pixel users have probably run into this—your real download speed is only 5 MB/s, but the floating window shows 10 MB/s.

Why Is the Network Speed in These Tools Always Inaccurate?

Simply put, this is the fault of Android’s old statistics mechanism. Traditional speed-meter apps usually read the system’s total traffic interfaces directly. When a proxy tool is enabled, data packets first pass through the physical network interface (such as wlan0) and are counted once. Then the data is unpacked and forwarded to the proxy tool’s virtual interface (such as tun0), where it gets counted again.

Most legacy apps simply add up the traffic from all interfaces, which results in displayed speeds that are often double the real speed.

Fortunately, AI-assisted programming has been booming lately. Since I couldn’t find a perfect alternative, an idea came to me: why not let AI help me write a network-speed app tailored specifically for Pixel?

And that’s how Pixel Meter was born.

What Makes Pixel Meter So Good?

As an app built to solve my own needs, Pixel Meter mainly addresses two core problems.

Accurate Traffic Statistics (Say Goodbye to Inflated Numbers)

Pixel Meter abandons the outdated global-statistics approach and instead uses the new API TrafficStats.getRxBytes(ifaceName) introduced in Android S (API 31).

This API allows an app to precisely obtain traffic data from a specific network interface. With a built-in whitelist and blacklist mechanism for network interfaces, Pixel Meter can intelligently filter out duplicate data from virtual interfaces created by proxy tools. Most importantly, this is achieved without requiring root access or Shizuku permissions—making it both efficient and accurate.

Possibly the Most Elegant Display Method Available

The Live Update Notification is, in my view, Pixel Meter’s biggest secret weapon. On Android 16 and some other high-version systems that support this feature, live update notifications avoid the space constraints and poor readability of traditional status-bar icons, allowing much richer information to be displayed more flexibly.

Let’s look at a comparison:

Pixel Meter, on the other hand, takes advantage of the notification area’s real-time update capability. Although there is a character limit (7 characters), it’s more than enough to clearly show “number + unit”:

More importantly, it doesn’t look like a third-party patch at all. Instead, it feels like a native system feature—clean, natural, and seamlessly integrated.

Behind the Scenes: I Provided the Ideas, AI Wrote the Code

The arrival of the AI era has completely changed the barrier to entry for individual developers.

In the past, I tried building a few small tools myself (such as an app to automatically skip ads), but I often gave up halfway because of the tedious initial setup and the long wait for positive feedback. The effort required was too high, the results too slow, and enthusiasm was easily drained.

But this time was completely different. During the development of Pixel Meter, I adopted a new “human–AI collaboration” model:

• I handled: architecture design, requirement analysis, and “code reviews” plus course correction when the AI made mistakes.
• Gemini handled: writing the concrete implementation code, generating documentation, and even preparing store-listing materials.

I used AntiGravity together with a custom GEMINI.md rules file. It’s like giving the AI a form of “long-term memory,” allowing it to remember our previous architecture discussions and coding standards. Even in a new session, it can read these “memory files” and quickly get back into development mode.

The final numbers were surprising: Pixel Meter has already released three versions, and about 90% of the code was generated by Gemini. Even the GitHub repository’s README, the privacy policy, and the promotional copy and featured images on Google Play were all created by it.

You’re Invited to Try It Out

At the moment, Pixel Meter is open-sourced on GitHub. You can also head to the Google Play Store and search for “Pixel Meter” to download and use it directly.

Whether you’re looking for a clean, no-frills network speed indicator, or you’re simply curious about the code quality of AI-assisted development, you’re more than welcome to give Pixel Meter a try.