By Espie Angelica A. de Leon
Tech titan Google has rolled out Datally, an app which allows smartphone users to understand, control, and save their mobile data as they engage in their online activities.
Now available globally on Google Play Store, Datally runs on Android 5.0 smartphones and higher.
Launched on Nov. 29 at the Google Philippines headquarters in Taguig City, Datally has four features to help users get over the problem of uncontrolled data usage.
The first of these four features is the Data Saver. Apps usually use up data in the background to update content and information. Data Saver turns this off and instead, lets users utilize their data for only the apps that they are interested in. People who tested Data Saver were able to save up to 30% of their mobile data.
Another feature is the Data Saver Bubble. This automatically appears once the Data Saver is turned on. Serving as a virtual speedometer for mobile data, the Data Saver Bubble shows the current rate of data usage in real time whatever app is being used. When the user sees that he is losing too much data, he can opt to halt data use with just one tap.
A third feature is the app?s Personalized Alerts. Aside from alerting the user when an app has consumed too much data, Personalized Alerts also show how much data he has used on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. Additionally, it will provide data-saving tips to the user.
Lastly, Datally?s Wi-Fi Finder helps the user get to the nearest high-quality Wi-Fi public network and connect. These public networks have been rated by the Datally community so once a user connects to it, he also gets the chance to rate it like the rest of the Datally app users.
The smart app is the product of an extensive user research around the world including the Philippines where it was found that many smartphone users worry about running out of data. This is especially true among the so-called Next Billion Users (NBU) or the emerging wave of new smartphone users in the world from Indonesia, India, Brazil and the Philippines.
In the Philippine alone where there are more than 60M people going online, smartphone user growth for 2017 is projected to grow by 16%, according to Google Philippines country manager Ken Lingan.
?The first experience of the Internet would probably come from a desktop or a laptop,? he said. ?But for most of the NBU users, they are coming from an experience where your only entry point to the Internet is the smartphone.?
The drawback, according to Lingan, is that most of them are purchasing lower-end smartphones with limitations in power, memory, capability, connectivity, and content.
?The NBU should not just have a different Internet from what we enjoyed,? he added. ?It just means that we need to develop a different ecosystem that is really suitable to their needs.?
For UP Diliman student and app tester James Makiramdam, Datally has really been very helpful.
?Before Datally, I just kept on using data and I didn?t know where these data were going. But when Datally came along, I learned that some apps use up more data than the others. Social networking sites turned out to be a big consumer of data. So now I get to control my data usage and instead allot it for the apps and sites that I really need,? he said.
The geodetic engineering student was one of three Datally app testers who shared their experiences during the launch of the app.
