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Those questions seem a bit loaded; since when does a business have any responsibility to "make the customer whole" in the event they exceed their data cap? Yes

Those questions seem a bit loaded; since when does a business have any responsibility to "make the customer whole" in the event they exceed their data cap? Yes, they could be more transparent about how much data is being used. Maybe display it in the settings somewhere. However, I can't see how a customer being slapped with a large bill falls on anyone other than the customer. Does Google have a plan to make me whole when I watch too many youtube videos? Or Apple when I stream too much Apple Music? Instagram when it pre-loads movies as I scroll through the app?

Waterluvian 10y ago
Don't you get a breakdown of what every app has used on Android? Why does the app need to repeat that?
- pkaeding 10y ago
  Yes, and I believe iOS gives the same breakdown (though it is not as intuitive to read, and it gives all-time-since-you-reset-the-counter data usage totals).
- SoreGums 10y ago
  The default android counter is lacking, however there are quite a few in the Play store and Facebook actually promotes one inside their app. Being an AUstralian 4G consumer, not using a data usage monitoring app is a recipe for "having a bad day". This is a customer problem, govt needs to ignore people being stupid. If a customer buys 200mb of data and doesn't know what/how much that is the customer needs to educate themselves. The telcos here even provide usage meters in their apps and update within minutes most of the time. Even in Vietnam I can send a txt to 888 with the phrase "data" and it tells me how much data is left. Niantic need to be completely dismissive of this whole data usage situation... Is the government going to send a letter about battery usage next because the average play time is higher than other app usage and when the user moves away from the house where the power cord is the user might not realise that the battery is going down faster?
loup-vaillant 10y ago
To paraphrase Jonathan Blow, game developers have a large impact. This comes with great responsibility. This permeates every aspect of the design: a game that consume significantly more resources than it should encourage players to renew their hardware sooner than they should have needed to —money that could be better spent elsewhere. Loading screen that take too long loses people's time. Only a bit of time, but with a lot of people. There are Skinner boxes like candy crush that prey on people's need for escapism, and create a compulsion that loses much of their time and sometimes money —we should consider prosecuting that last one criminally. Eating too much of one's data plan is one responsibility among many. The sad fact, is most people are uninformed, ignorant, and don't want to learn. But the temptation to say they had it coming doesn't help. And even if people were careful, the mere need to be careful is a burden that would have been avoided if the game didn't consume so much freaking bandwidth. --- YouTube can't reduce the bandwidth, short of re-encoding everything, which it probably does already. Plus, people expect movies take bandwidth. Same for Apple (they already compress music without the user's consent or knowledge, which is bad, but at least it saves bandwidth). Instagram pre-loading should probably be tunable, maybe even off by default, though. --- If the app's bandwidth consumption exceeds all expectation, making the consumer whole should be considered. There is a point where this stuff is the app's fault.
- TrevorJ 10y ago
  It isn't clear from the document that the App uses more data than most of it's type. 20 meg/per hour seems likely to be on par or even a bit less than browsing facebook mobile for the same amount of time. The trouble seems to stem from the amount of time people are using the app, which is above the average for other apps.
  - pdkl95 10y ago
    > uses more data than most of it's type First, there are not that many games of this type, but the user will see this as a "game". Most games don't use any bandwidth, and network games are often fairly lightweight in bandwidth, while some use a lot more. I doubt most games use anywhere close to the bandwidth used by modern bloated websites. If this game is different from the usual expectations of a game, it should include a warning and estimation of it's bandwidth usage. > browsing facebook mobile Why are you comparing playing a game to browsing a website? These are entirely unrelated activities with different expectations.
udkl 10y ago
The examples you give : Instagram, YouTube & Apple Music are 'familiar' services that serve media. You can argue that the major population does not need education to understand the data these apps will use. Pokemon is a newer gaming app that gives out no obvious signals about it's high data usage. I'm not saying the customer is not to be held responsible, I'm saying it would just have been good UX to provide a warning about typical app data usage. The government does seem to be overreaching here.
- p11g 10y ago
  > Pokemon is a newer gaming app that gives out no obvious signals about it's high data usage. Huh. I don't own a smart phone, but my 15-year-old daughter noticed at the end of day one how much data she blew on Pokemon Go. I'm not saying it's easy, but why couldn't anyone else do what she did?
  - roywiggins 10y ago
    You do have to be the kind of person who checks your data usage all the time. If you don't use much data and never hit your limit, you wouldn't check unless you knew that Pokemon Go sucked down a lot more data than you were used to.
    - TeMPOraL 10y ago
      It's... something about the way some people approach technology, I guess. Whenever I get a new app that I use while on the go, I always check the data usage stats at least once to get a feel on how much of my data plan that particular app uses. It's like... bloody natural and obvious thing to do -.-. (And like many of those things, what's totally obvious for one is something totally nonobvious for someone else.)
brianpgordon 10y ago
One time on a road trip years ago I downloaded the Guitar Hero mobile game to my Razr to kill time. It turns out that the game downloads song data repeatedly when you play different songs. An hour or so of playing ended up costing me almost $100. I didn't understand how much data was being used, and I didn't ever want to use mobile data again (on my feature phone) after that point. I can definitely see regulators being concerned about this kind of predatory pricing. Carriers should price data close to what it costs them to offer it, not at outrageously high prices to milk as much money as possible out of their customers before they realize what they're spending.
- fsaneq2 10y ago
  Well, yes -- but the letter is to Niantic, not carriers.
  - MBCook 10y ago
    This is also the developers responsibility. Last summer I was playing a fun little game on my iPhone and kept causing problems for other people on the same Wi-Fi network just me. It turned out that when you dismissed a video ad is soon as possible to skip it, it seemed to keep downloading the ad anyway. And then maybe some more. I don't know, but it was a huge data hog on Wi-Fi. If that happened on cellular (I didn't play much while out and about, and it may have changed its behavior on cell) it could've easily racked up a huge bill. And that would be the developers fault. In the two weeks I've been playing Pokémon go my iPhone says I've used 150 MB of data. I've been looking at it a lot as I drive around (whenever I stop in a parking lot), and I often leave it running while driving (to get those fake steps when I'm going slow enough) and it hasn't done much so I don't think the game is missbehaving. Given that it seems to have to constantly reload landmarks in areas I frequent some cashing might be a good idea, but it's not too horrendous.
    - TeMPOraL 10y ago
      The "best and brightests" do that too. I once wanted to test out the Google Photos app. I installed it... and it basically killed every Wi-Fi network I happened to be on - whether home or the local Hackerspace. In the few minutes I spent trying to find the source of the problem, it managed to push 4GB of data over the wire... even though I only had like 1.2GB of actual photos on my device!

Waterluvian 10y ago

Don't you get a breakdown of what every app has used on Android? Why does the app need to repeat that?

pkaeding 10y ago
Yes, and I believe iOS gives the same breakdown (though it is not as intuitive to read, and it gives all-time-since-you-reset-the-counter data usage totals).
SoreGums 10y ago
The default android counter is lacking, however there are quite a few in the Play store and Facebook actually promotes one inside their app. Being an AUstralian 4G consumer, not using a data usage monitoring app is a recipe for "having a bad day". This is a customer problem, govt needs to ignore people being stupid. If a customer buys 200mb of data and doesn't know what/how much that is the customer needs to educate themselves. The telcos here even provide usage meters in their apps and update within minutes most of the time. Even in Vietnam I can send a txt to 888 with the phrase "data" and it tells me how much data is left. Niantic need to be completely dismissive of this whole data usage situation... Is the government going to send a letter about battery usage next because the average play time is higher than other app usage and when the user moves away from the house where the power cord is the user might not realise that the battery is going down faster?

loup-vaillant 10y ago

To paraphrase Jonathan Blow, game developers have a large impact. This comes with great responsibility. This permeates every aspect of the design: a game that consume significantly more resources than it should encourage players to renew their hardware sooner than they should have needed to —money that could be better spent elsewhere. Loading screen that take too long loses people's time. Only a bit of time, but with a lot of people. There are Skinner boxes like candy crush that prey on people's need for escapism, and create a compulsion that loses much of their time and sometimes money —we should consider prosecuting that last one criminally. Eating too much of one's data plan is one responsibility among many. The sad fact, is most people are uninformed, ignorant, and don't want to learn. But the temptation to say they had it coming doesn't help. And even if people were careful, the mere need to be careful is a burden that would have been avoided if the game didn't consume so much freaking bandwidth. --- YouTube can't reduce the bandwidth, short of re-encoding everything, which it probably does already. Plus, people expect movies take bandwidth. Same for Apple (they already compress music without the user's consent or knowledge, which is bad, but at least it saves bandwidth). Instagram pre-loading should probably be tunable, maybe even off by default, though. --- If the app's bandwidth consumption exceeds all expectation, making the consumer whole should be considered. There is a point where this stuff is the app's fault.

TrevorJ 10y ago
It isn't clear from the document that the App uses more data than most of it's type. 20 meg/per hour seems likely to be on par or even a bit less than browsing facebook mobile for the same amount of time. The trouble seems to stem from the amount of time people are using the app, which is above the average for other apps.
- pdkl95 10y ago
  > uses more data than most of it's type First, there are not that many games of this type, but the user will see this as a "game". Most games don't use any bandwidth, and network games are often fairly lightweight in bandwidth, while some use a lot more. I doubt most games use anywhere close to the bandwidth used by modern bloated websites. If this game is different from the usual expectations of a game, it should include a warning and estimation of it's bandwidth usage. > browsing facebook mobile Why are you comparing playing a game to browsing a website? These are entirely unrelated activities with different expectations.

udkl 10y ago

The examples you give : Instagram, YouTube & Apple Music are 'familiar' services that serve media. You can argue that the major population does not need education to understand the data these apps will use. Pokemon is a newer gaming app that gives out no obvious signals about it's high data usage. I'm not saying the customer is not to be held responsible, I'm saying it would just have been good UX to provide a warning about typical app data usage. The government does seem to be overreaching here.

p11g 10y ago
> Pokemon is a newer gaming app that gives out no obvious signals about it's high data usage. Huh. I don't own a smart phone, but my 15-year-old daughter noticed at the end of day one how much data she blew on Pokemon Go. I'm not saying it's easy, but why couldn't anyone else do what she did?
- roywiggins 10y ago
  You do have to be the kind of person who checks your data usage all the time. If you don't use much data and never hit your limit, you wouldn't check unless you knew that Pokemon Go sucked down a lot more data than you were used to.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    It's... something about the way some people approach technology, I guess. Whenever I get a new app that I use while on the go, I always check the data usage stats at least once to get a feel on how much of my data plan that particular app uses. It's like... bloody natural and obvious thing to do -.-. (And like many of those things, what's totally obvious for one is something totally nonobvious for someone else.)

brianpgordon 10y ago

One time on a road trip years ago I downloaded the Guitar Hero mobile game to my Razr to kill time. It turns out that the game downloads song data repeatedly when you play different songs. An hour or so of playing ended up costing me almost $100. I didn't understand how much data was being used, and I didn't ever want to use mobile data again (on my feature phone) after that point. I can definitely see regulators being concerned about this kind of predatory pricing. Carriers should price data close to what it costs them to offer it, not at outrageously high prices to milk as much money as possible out of their customers before they realize what they're spending.

fsaneq2 10y ago
Well, yes -- but the letter is to Niantic, not carriers.
- MBCook 10y ago
  This is also the developers responsibility. Last summer I was playing a fun little game on my iPhone and kept causing problems for other people on the same Wi-Fi network just me. It turned out that when you dismissed a video ad is soon as possible to skip it, it seemed to keep downloading the ad anyway. And then maybe some more. I don't know, but it was a huge data hog on Wi-Fi. If that happened on cellular (I didn't play much while out and about, and it may have changed its behavior on cell) it could've easily racked up a huge bill. And that would be the developers fault. In the two weeks I've been playing Pokémon go my iPhone says I've used 150 MB of data. I've been looking at it a lot as I drive around (whenever I stop in a parking lot), and I often leave it running while driving (to get those fake steps when I'm going slow enough) and it hasn't done much so I don't think the game is missbehaving. Given that it seems to have to constantly reload landmarks in areas I frequent some cashing might be a good idea, but it's not too horrendous.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    The "best and brightests" do that too. I once wanted to test out the Google Photos app. I installed it... and it basically killed every Wi-Fi network I happened to be on - whether home or the local Hackerspace. In the few minutes I spent trying to find the source of the problem, it managed to push 4GB of data over the wire... even though I only had like 1.2GB of actual photos on my device!