Data minimizing, and AT&T users

[releki]

Since AT&T came out with the 200mb/month and 2gb/month, I have been a bit more stingy about data usage, as I'm sure most people are. That brings me a concern with weblications, especially Google Voice and Black Swan. I do not know how much bandwidth is used to access/use GV/BSwan, but I heard that Black Swan is stored locally. Does that mean it uses less data to access the weblication? Can someone explain that to me?

Well, I'm here to suggest a new, but reasonable idea: an AT&T mode or iPhone mode, or data minimizing mode. Although I'm sure that a text is 160 bytes, I'm not sure about Black Swan itself.

A mode that configures all settings to use the least data as possible, such as disabling photos for contacts, etc.

A manual update mode(as in SMS notifications)? As in updates that use data do not occur in the background, using data without my knowledge. Or do you already have this?

Is this possible? Of course, there'd be an option to revert, but I think this would be very useful for newer and upcoming AT&T customers. Don't get me wrong, I love what Black Swan offers, it's AT&T that is irksome. I'm pretty sure Verizon would bring tiered data plans also. Maybe you could also induce this to the premium version(seeing as that it also does not have ads)

Thank you!

[Chris]

Overall data usage and a way to disable background SMS updating was mentioned in this thread:

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=181

I'm going to get a little technical here in order to answer the question. I believe a lot of our users will understand most of this and will be able to search for details about the rest. If anyone wants/needs more detail, feel free to ask questions. Obviously, we can't go into certain details because we don't want to "give away" too many specifics about the app.

While limited data plans are "new" to iPhone users, Riverturn has considered bandwidth restrictions from day 1 since we have to pay Google for data usage over a certain limit (plus, making the app feel faster makes it more comparable to native apps). All of the client side files including HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and images are stored locally on your device using HTML5 offline caching.

Each time you load the app, your device fetches the main HTML page (no included pages or images), the list of offline files, and the app icon. If the list of offline files has been modified, an update of all offline files is triggered. That means that we/you take a larger 1-time hit during installation and with each update of the client (once-twice per month on average since the public release), but your device does not even try to download images or other web files during typical daily usage.

The data passed between the client and server during normal usage is kept to a minimum by passing JSON objects rather than a bunch of unnecessary data/markup. You can further minimize this data usage by changing the Auto-Refresh setting for SMS conversations as described in the thread linked above. Also, you can change the Launch Refresh setting so that voicemail/call/billing/SMS/contact data is not automatically fetched on launch. That gives you more control over which data you want updated during each use.

There are a few ways we can reduce data usage even more. Allowing users to disable fetching of contact photos is one way; I just entered a feature request for that. Reducing the size of the primary HTML file is another since it is downloaded with every launch of the app. Considering it's only about 32 KB of data, I'm not sure how much benefit there would be in slightly reducing its size. Expect it to be looked at, though. A third idea would be to reduce the amount of data sent between the client and server. Since it's already minimized, I doubt we could trim more than about 5% of that data without going "insane" with it. Finally, we have an idea for speeding up the SMS auto-refresh by reducing the amount of data returned. It's scheduled to be looked at for the next release (after today's), so it will be implemented soon if it turns out to be possible.

It would be great if we could detect when the device is on wi-fi and when it's on the cellular network, but that's not possible as far as I know. I believe that monitoring your monthly usage without changing your usage patterns will show that you're "OK" as-is. I looked at my prior usage patterns when the limited data plans were announced and had never exceeded 200 MB in a month, but I'm almost always on a wi-fi connection in the office or at clients' sites. The existing fetch options can reduce data usage and the items I mentioned above will be investigated and possibly implemented individually over the next few months.