If we are talking strictly about Andreas' Android core wallet, what it wants me to do is buy, sell, and trade in small amounts of bitcoin in the first place. so far so good.
If I fire up the app, I even can't see my 12-word seed without first loading some bitcoin into it.
My question is, is there a simple implementation of the same idea but one which let's me play with my 12-word seed and all that is behind the scenes, before I put actual money into it?
The Hive Wallet was such a fork of Andreas's code. I previously used Hive's web version and liked it. I don't know anything about how Hive for android worked, though.
I don't have the latest version, but I have decrypted the wallet from andreas's program in the past and used the bitcoinj tools to pull the seed out of it. I don't think any such functionality is exposed in the gui, though (although it would be nice).