Clonner

An Android app that gives your installed apps clones — each with its own name, its own badge colour, its own home-screen icon and its own ad-blocking policy — plus Ad Shield, an on-device DNS filter that stops ads and trackers from loading in the first place.

Built with Kotlin, Jetpack Compose and Material 3. No root required.

What it does Clones. Pick any installed app and make a clone of it. A clone is a launch profile: your own name for it, a coloured badge so two clones of the same app stay tellable apart, and a per-clone switch for ad blocking.

Home-screen shortcuts. One tap pins a clone to your launcher with a badged version of the app's icon. Tapping it brings Ad Shield up (if that clone wants it) and then opens the app.

Ad Shield. A local VPN that filters DNS. Lookups for known ad and tracker domains are answered NXDOMAIN on the device, so the ad request never leaves your phone. Everything else is forwarded to the upstream resolver untouched. Live counters show what's being blocked, and you can add your own rules.

How the ad blocking works — and what it deliberately does not do Clonner does not modify, repackage, patch or redistribute other apps. No APK is rewritten, no ad SDK is stripped, no code is injected into another process. That approach is copyright infringement, it breaks app signatures, and it will get you removed from the Play Store. Clonner does not do it.

Instead ads are blocked at the network layer, the same approach used by AdAway, DNS66, Blokada and RethinkDNS:

ClonnerVpnService establishes a TUN interface and routes only the DNS server address into it (addRoute(10.215.173.2, 32)). All other traffic takes its normal path and never passes through Clonner. Each DNS query is parsed for its question name. BlocklistEngine checks the domain and each of its parent domains against the loaded rules. User overrides win over list rules, and the most specific override wins. Blocked → Clonner synthesises an NXDOMAIN reply itself and writes it back. Allowed → the query goes to the upstream resolver over a protect()ed socket, and the reply is relayed back verbatim. The word "VPN" here is only the Android API that lets an app see its own device's DNS traffic. There is no Clonner server and no remote endpoint. Nothing about the apps you have installed or the domains you look up is uploaded anywhere.

Two kinds of clone Clonner has a Clones tab and a Real tab, and they do genuinely different things.

Clones tab — shortcut clones. Your own name, colour and pinned home-screen icon for an app you already have. Tapping one opens the real installed app and shares its data and login. Good for organisation and per-app shielding; it is not a second account.

Real tab — work-profile clones. This is the actual thing. Android's managed-profile mechanism runs a second copy of an app as a different Android user, with its own data directory and its own login. Two Instagram accounts, both signed in, side by side. It is the same mechanism behind Shelter and Island, and behind the "Work" copies of apps on a corporate phone.

Setup runs through Android's own provisioning flow — Clonner cannot create a profile silently, and the system asks you to confirm. Nothing is wiped and your personal apps are untouched. Once the profile exists, cloning happens from the work-profile copy of Clonner (the Real tab links straight to it), which calls DevicePolicyManager.installExistingPackage to install an app that is already on the device. No APK is ever read, copied or repackaged — the system installs its own copy.

Caveats worth knowing before you rely on it:

Android allows one work profile per device. If your employer already set one up, or another app owns it, Clonner cannot use it. Requires Android 9 (API 28) and a device with FEATURE_MANAGED_USERS. Some Go-edition and budget devices ship without it. Removing the work profile removes every cloned app and its data with it. Cloned apps appear in your launcher with a briefcase badge.