We’ve had a couple of questions (and user reports) about how much data traffic Imity actually consumes, and there’s a couple of things I’d like to say about that.
First things first: I’m adding a traffic counter to the mobile application right now - and that will be available this week, so you can tell howmuch data we’re trying to send over the network.
Second: It’s a little bit tricky to “do the right thing” here: The whole purpose of the app is to save your life history to the web, which obviously consumes traffic, so it’s always going to have a traffic cost if you don’t have a flat data plan.
We haven’t in regular use had problems amoung the founder/developers in this regard - but we are no longer our heaviest users.
Third: There’s a conflict of interest here between the quality of the log and the cost of transmission. Some of the reports we get are from users unhappy with holes in their logs.
Fourth: A lot of the traffic issues are outside our control. I realize that stability at our end is an issue and very important. It’s clear from the blog that we could have hoped for more for the first couple of weeks. I’m working to make that as good as I can - but experience tells us that network stability is a huge issue with the mobile internet. It’s not even that we can recommend specific carriers. We have found connectivity to be very different as you move from cell to cell even and that’s across several carriers here in the Copenhagen area.

What I’m looking into now, along side metering, is a good solid way to save observations for later submission and I’m working to make it much more visible in the app how many networking problems we’ve been having for your phone/carrier/location combination and how much of your life history is stuck on your phone for later submission. Stay tuned for an update.

UPDATE: Sorry about the slight delay - I plan/hope to have a client out with a new econo-mode for long term in-pocket use tomorrow.

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