AssistiveDot: Assistive Button

A floating button that puts your phone's controls within reach.

AssistiveDot places a small, movable button on top of everything. Tap it and the controls you need most are right there — no reaching for a hardware key, no system gesture to get exactly right, no stretching for the top of the screen.

Built for anyone who finds hardware buttons or system gestures difficult, painful, or unreliable — and for anyone whose power button has simply stopped working.

What it can do
• Back, Home, Recents and Lock, without touching a hardware button
• Notification shade and Quick Settings, without reaching the top of the screen
• Volume — opens Android's own volume panel
• Screenshots: the whole screen, a region you drag, a timed 3-2-1, or a long scrolling capture
• Copy text off the screen, including from images and videos
• Screen recording, with your voice if you want it
• Torch, rotation lock and ringer mode
• Pin your favourite apps and launch them from inside any other app

Accessibility service
AssistiveDot uses Android's AccessibilityService API, and asks you to turn on an accessibility service called AssistiveDot in Settings. That API is the only way an app can press Back, Home, Recents or Lock, pull down the notification shade or Quick Settings, or take a screenshot for you. It is what makes the dot work as a replacement for hardware buttons and system gestures, which is the whole point of the app.

It is used for that and nothing else. The service is declared without permission to retrieve window content, so AssistiveDot cannot read what is on your screen, cannot read text inside your apps, and cannot see anything you type — Android enforces that, it is not just a promise. It acts only when you tap a tile or use a gesture you have bound yourself. Before sending you to the accessibility settings, the app shows you exactly what the service will and will not do. You can turn it off at any time in Settings > Accessibility, and the rest of the app keeps working with fewer tiles.

Yours to arrange
Choose which tiles appear and in what order. Bind a tap, double tap or long press straight to an action so it fires without opening the panel. Set the button's size, opacity and the size of its menu. Turn haptics down or off.

Private by design
No accounts, no analytics, no crash reporting, no ads, no trackers, no third-party SDKs. The app's only network connection is to Google Play, to check whether you bought the one-time unlock — nothing about your screen, your captures or how you use the app is ever transmitted.

Text recognition runs entirely on your device against a model bundled in the app, and works in aeroplane mode. Screenshots and recordings are saved straight to your gallery.

Free, and staying free: everything that makes the dot work as an assistive button — Back, Home, Recents, Lock, the shade, quick settings, volume, screenshots and screen recording. The one-time unlock adds copy-text, scrolling and region capture, pinned apps, and maximum recording quality.