pinyin

[jrpie]

As pointed out by @JayHawSG in #37 (see this comment) it would be nice if apps with chinese names would be sorted by the pinyin transliteration and if searching would also work with pinyin.

The complexity seems to be quite high, so some library would be needed.
It would be ideal if there was a way to do this using the Android API, but so far I have not figured out why.

Using an API that requires network access is not an option because of privacy considerations

[FlyCloudC]

Suggestion: Allow users to set aliases for apps. This is equivalent to supporting pinyin in disguise and is more flexible

[jrpie]

To be honest, I don't think that is a good solution. Who would want to manually annotate all of their apps just in order to get minor feature like pinyin search working?

There might be other uses for aliases (I can't really think of any right now that would be worth the added complexity, but people already convinced me to implement hidden apps, so don't take this as a definite no). If that's the case, feel free to open a new issue then we can discuss it there.
But I won't implement aliases if pinyin is the main use case.