Android phones come with a ton of pre-installed apps, most of which are Google-made applications that can help you get your day-to-day work done. Some manufacturers install their own set of apps out-of-the-box, but the one app that you will notice on every Android phone you use is SIM Toolkit. So what is SIM Toolkit and what can you do with it? That’s what we’ll be talking about in this post.
What does the SIM Toolkit app do?
As smartphones started getting more and more features, the process of setting up SIM cards (technically called provisioning) was getting harder day by day. This is because provisioning a SIM on a phone required details like SMS center number, MMS server name, mailbox number and other details. These details differed from one operator to another and that is where SIM Application Toolkit came into being.
SIM Toolkit or SIM Application Toolkit (STK) is a set of commands available on your SIM card, defined by 3GPP and ETSI specifications, that can be triggered by the user or by a network event. They are essentially small applications pre-installed on your SIM, which itself can be considered as a mini-computer capable of programming.
STK was developed as a way to run applications directly on a SIM card based on a GSM network. The standard is used by mobile network operators and service providers to perform actions that activate various value-added services. These value-added services can then be implemented on your SIM card to bring a provider’s customized UI and menus to different handsets.
