New to mobile programming - how difficult is this concept?

16    25 Mar 2016 15:19 by u/bob3333

I am getting pretty tired of Verizon, AT&T, and other crappy wireless providers constantly lowering data caps and increasing prices. They claim it's to preserve network performance, but we all know that's bullshit. That gave me the idea of creating an app that would call their bluff, so to speak. What if we had an app where you enter your monthly data cap and billing date, and the app makes sure you use your entire allotment? In other words, as the end of the billing cycle draws near it could start silently consuming data to make sure you use your entire monthly cap.

The carriers rely on people buying more data than they need and banking the profit. Enter this app that would make sure every person running it used their entire data allowance every month. The carriers would either have to admit that they don't have the capacity that they're selling, or they'd have to lower data caps even further and anger more customers. Either way is a win for the customer because it forces the truth out into the light of day.

I have some experience doing pretty basic programming for the Win32 platform and even less for Linux, but have no idea about mobile. How difficult would such an app be in terms of development time? I'm just trying to see if I'd be in over my head or if it would be doable.

7 comments

5 u/Drenki 25 Mar 2016 17:19

Probably not too hard, but I don't have much experience developing on mobile.

Given how many people are creating apps these days, seems anyone could do it with a little dedication.

For anyone who wants to give it a go, I would also recommend this:

Don't transfer garbage. Have it send unecrypted text that has all the keywords the three letter agencies watch for. It's unlikely to overload their system, but at least it makes their domestic spying less useful.

0 u/DrBunsen 25 Mar 2016 15:50

IT should save some space when using up your cap, because are those caps 1000bytes to a kb or 1024 bytes to a kb?

And this is not proving anything, it is just a risk to go over your cap.

And if it is so expensive, why do you have such a high cap that there is a real need for an app like this?

0 u/LoftyGoat 26 Mar 2016 04:20

For Android and WinCE (or whatever Ms' handset OS is called these days) it will be more of a matter of learning the OS' programming interface than of writing code.

All allow the network stack to be wedged, so it's a matter of counting bytes in and out, storing the count periodically and whenever the app receives a shutdown event. That will be the difficult part: not difficult to code but difficult climbing a steep learning curve.

Creating a rudimentary UI to show the results is the simple part.

There are any number of free Android IDEs out there, and you can get VS Express from Microsoft to code for their handset OS for free (the last time I checked) from their Web site.

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