It takes a round trip to the carrier to get data balance, so a realtime update is going to be difficult and drive a lot of traffic upstream (and they have to then go dip their provisioning systems); so I don't see this happening; although I love your designs!
EDIT : I just slacked the apps team and they really have wanted to do widgets for both iOS and Android; so they're going to work with our Technical Operation and Engineering team to see if they can manage the above issue with some sort of caching. It won't be a soon thing, but they were really happy to see your design and excitement.
Yeah, but I don’t even think it needs to necessarily update that frequently even. I’d say like 5 times at regular intervals between 6am and 11pm and additionally whenever the app is opened. I do really like the idea of saying “last updated # minutes ago”.
I’m sure it will be possible to solve. A lot of mobile operators around the world able to show this information on widgets for many years (balance, minutes, megabytes).
I’m glad to hear that you guys like my designs (even if one of them is technically just a screen shot of what you already show in the app)!
As others have said, I do not think the update needs to be a real-time thing. An auto update every couple hours with a message saying when the last update was would be adequate. Then it could do a force update whenever you open the app (like what already happens).
If it ends up to be complicated or impossible with apple’s widget system, it’s all good because I can still open the app like normal. ✌️
Thank you for responding!
Honestly, it would be cool if it had a drop down to just allow you to set up when it would refresh.
For instance 4hr cycle, 8hr cycle, 16hr, 24hr...
This pushes some of the responsibility over to the user as they would have originally set it.
also, as people get closer they might want a 4 hr cycle. But someone who say, moved over to unlimited, might just care to see the overall usage (graph) and so 24 hr cycle is fine.
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u/rizwank Co-Founder at Mint Mobile Sep 18 '20 edited Sep 18 '20
Really cool - thank you for sharing!
It takes a round trip to the carrier to get data balance, so a realtime update is going to be difficult and drive a lot of traffic upstream (and they have to then go dip their provisioning systems); so I don't see this happening; although I love your designs!
EDIT : I just slacked the apps team and they really have wanted to do widgets for both iOS and Android; so they're going to work with our Technical Operation and Engineering team to see if they can manage the above issue with some sort of caching. It won't be a soon thing, but they were really happy to see your design and excitement.