Many Kenyans love complaining about one thing: data bundles. Very recently I read some tweet where someone said the most stressing message is “your data bundle is below…”
Data prices have fallen in Kenya over the recent months. Telkom and Airtel have really pushed the prices down, and Safaricom’s current promotion is also taking things to the next level. But people will still complain about data usage. And it isn’t just a Kenyan thing. So Google’s new app will hopefully help many people out.
Datally is made by Google’s Next Billion Users division whose mission is to make the internet more accessible in developing nations. “Data is how we connect to the world, and without data we miss out”. Ideally the app, which promises up to 30% in savings, is meant to make you not miss out.
Datally does a couple of things that many Android phones already do, it makes you control which apps can have access to data and which ones cannot.
But that’s not all. Datally also shows you a real time bubble of how much data you’ve used on a single app so that you can control that when you need to. For example, if you’re on Facebook, you’ll see a bubble showing you how much you’ve spent on the app, and that should tell you whether to stop or not. So you don’t go tweeting your provider about your data mysteriously running out.
The app will also allow you access to a graph on usage daily, weekly, monthly wherein below you’ll see which apps are consuming most, so that you can restrict or enable their access to data.
Datally will also search for open WiFi Hotspots around you so that you can access these free WiFi networks instead of using your data.
If you’re a user of Opera MAX you may find this kind of a similar concept. Except for the real time monitoring per app, the idea of saving data is the same. But as for now one can’t tell which app actually saves you more data. Though Datally is promising more functionality that rather actually genius.
What I know about data saving is that it is all dependent on how you use your phone. You can’t spend time watching YouTube videos in HD and expect to save much data. You can’t tether to your laptop without metering your connection if on Windows. So to save data just monitor your usage and limit your access to many services when not connected to WiFi.
Check out Datally on Google Play Store.
