Pokémon Go data usage draws attention of House Energy and Commerce Committee [pdf]
democrats-energycommerce.house.gov
democrats-energycommerce.house.gov
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?
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?
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.
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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.
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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.
The trouble seems to stem from the amount of time people are using the app, which is above the average for other apps.
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.
...that said, Pokémon Go could sure use a lot more caching. It seems that (didn't confirm with a packet sniffer, but latency says it all), for example, it redownloads all Pokéstop data whenever you visit it. That's IMO utterly ridiculous - a Pokéstop is pretty much a permanent fixture (an ex-Ingress portal), it doesn't change, and the user itself is expected to mostly stay in the same geographical area. I don't see any good reason not to cache at least the visual stuff.
Which brings me to the general problem of the hipstery approach to development - download and redownload everything from Internet ad infinitum, as if everyone had broadband and electricity was free.
Most of the people playing Pokemon have probably never heard of Ingress.
I agree that it could use a lot more caching, though!
I am comparing it to Facebook because that is what the linked document in question does.
I suspect you are being overly pedantic as a way to avoid my core point, which is that this application doesn't consume much/any more data per hour than most other activities people use a smart phone for. Even the linked document shows that.
You cannot say this for sure about Pokemon Go, neither can I.
The only way a customer can have an informed expectation about that is if the developer tells the user upfront how much data the application will use.
Regarding expectations you give this example:
> Plus, people expect movies take bandwidth
How did people learn to expect this when the first movies were available online? They didn't have any comparison back then.
And what exactly is this expectation? Does any non-tech customer know today what the bandwidth usage of 4K video streaming should be and how much less it should be for a 720p video? And which company does a better job at this? Netflix, YouTube or Amazon Prime?
Customers probably just know about bandwidth usage for video: it uses "a lot"
The thing is that movie apps can at least be somewhat categorised in terms of what they will do, but for games this is hardly possible.
There the bandwidth usage can be all over the place, starting from online chess to VR games with high res video experiences.
> 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.
Primarily it is the customers obligation to manage and monitor his private bandwidth usage. After that it is the carriers obligation to make sure they track the usage correctly.
Turning this upside down and placing the burden on the developer will not help as the users cannot have a reasonable expectation and trying to regulate the world to fulfill whatever phantasies people might have has never worked.
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.
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?
(And like many of those things, what's totally obvious for one is something totally nonobvious for someone else.)
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.
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.
If I go to the gym and drop 100kg on myself then it is my fault for not understanding the risks, where it is reasonable to do so.
It is reasonable to expect you as a customer of the internet service to understand the service you are using and the costs involved. It really falls on no one elses shoulders.
I do agree that it tends to be over priced and the pricing structure is often confusing but I still think it's within the grasp of most to understand it.
None the less, it is definitely a balance of transparency and I think it is fair to ask for app vendors to properly optimoze and advertise the data usage of their apps in some way.
People can understand it, but they usually don't habitually check it, resulting in surprise bills.
Some angry support tickets might be warranted though!
It's pretty much like not giving you the car speedomoter, and then the city places speed trap cameras all over the city and then after a month, you get a bill for $200 because you went over 4 times.
This business make money first mentality is pretty bonkers.
The internet provider offers a service with certain penalties that are typically made clear enough if you read the contract. It is up to you, through whatever means you have available, to not use it in a way that gets you excess charges.
I like your speed trap analogy but I still don't think it is the ISP at fault. If you can't afford the overage and your phone has no metering then there are plans and pre paid plans available to suit that need. You are still the one signing up to the service and using it, you don't have to if you think the situation is unfair.
If this game is consuming more bandwidth than is necessary to deliver its experience, then they are doing something wrong. Both in the technical sense and the moral sense.
Developers have a moral obligation to not waste their user's resources, dammit.
We've shown over the past 40 years that we value developer productivity much more than user resources. Most relevantly, consider the average size of a webpage: http://www.yottaa.com/company/blog/application-optimization/...
And then we can also support those working on changing the platform-level stuff.
Of course: we're developers, and we can't multiply. When we use the user's time, we picture using one user, not one million (or, more reasonably, a couple thousands). So it rarely occurs to us that the users' resources are vastly more important than our own productivity.
To a lesser extent, this can be true for custom software as well.
I'm honestly a little offended at the notion that developers owe anything beyond what's contractually agreed to their users. That something can be accessed and enjoyed for free, that it can be preferable to any other alternative activity the user could be doing, and still not be enough on the part of the supplier to avoid moral condemnation seems like the height of entitlement.
This is a straw man - nobody expects perfection. For some reason there is a lot of resistance to educating the use and asking their permission.
I suspect that this game simply needed a clear warning before download and on startup that includes an estimate of the bandwidth needs. Perhaps only the first startup with an acknowledgement from the user. It may not be possible, but if there is a way to estimate the remaining data plan limit it, including an estimate that "This game will use X% of your data plan per hour" would be a very good way to let the user manage the own usage.
> offended
Welcome to the club. I'm offended every time a developer user resources (including data) without specific informed consent. "Free" is rarely without cost, and the user is rarely informed in detail. This lack of respect for the user has grown in recent years with the paternalistic attitude that users shouldn't/can't understand technology and the developer should manage the software for the user. Often this is claimed to be for dubious security reasons.
You complain that the developer shouldn't have to do anything beyond what they promised in a contract. They can have that level of interaction if-and-only-if they inform the user properly so the user can make informed choices, and they leave the user alone. If, however, the developer wants to retain any amount of control such as data gathering, forcing updates, or using any user resources without informed consent, then the developer is the responsible party. Let the user actually manage everything for themselves in a responsible manner, or accept liability for any problems derived from your software.
> height of entitlement
The height of improper entitlement are the developers that think they have a right to spy on users, take actions on the user's system without their permission, or otherwise do anything behind the user's back.
The user, however, is entitled to business interactions free of any dissembling or obfuscation.
The person I responded to specifically said waste. As in the part they find morally unacceptable is that if a developer had spent more of their time optimising their product they could have got the data use down from 20mb/hour to something less but chose not to.
If not perfection then they're still setting the bar for morally acceptable actions to be somewhere between benefitting others and perfection. So my question there would still remain. If someone developing a data wasteful product that people enjoy using is immoral, what exactly is me sitting on my couch eating doritos and watching tv? It's benefiting others far less than creating pokemon go is.
>I suspect that this game simply needed a clear warning before download and on startup that includes an estimate of the bandwidth needs.
Why this game? Or do you think all internet using apps should do this? If so why would this not be on the operating system rather than every app rolling their own version? Note that they already do measure data use and allow for restriction. If pokemon go is using between 10 and 20 mb of data per hour as the paper suggests then I'd be very surprised to learn that this is in excess of most peoples data useage per hour of internet use. Facebook, instagram, snapchat, reddit, pinterest, youtube, spotify, browsing around on ad and large header image infected news sites is standard internet use no?
>Welcome to the club. I'm offended every time a developer user resources (including data) without specific informed consent.
I don't see why informed is their responsibility and not yours. They aren't choosing to run their work on your device.
>This lack of respect for the user has grown in recent years
Why does the user of a free service deserve anything from the developer, including either the service or respect? Why does the developer owe the user respect? Where did they earn that? If they are paying for the product, why do they deserve anything more than is listed that they're paying for, of which I know at the very least for pokemon go 'respect' is not a listed item.
>They can have that level of interaction if-and-only-if they inform the user properly so the user can make informed choices, and they leave the user alone.
Why is the default that they owe the user something unless stated otherwise? Were they born with this responsibility? Was it bestowed upon them when they learned to develop? When they wrote the code? When they put it on a public accessible site? When they marketed it? I can't see at which point they start to owe complete strangers something if not at the point of contract signing.
Now I understand that you're trying to prevent shifting all the blame and responsibility on developers. Indeed, I don't think this is an issue that should prevent one from sleeping at night, or something. But I believe that - as a basic part of the craft - it should be something one thinks about. That as a developer, one should minimize the load of one's product on the end-user to the extent it's reasonable.
A perfect app does all the things user needs while using zero resources. We will never make a perfect app, but we can sure treat it as something to aim towards.
Scale matters.
Let's suppose they reduce the data use down to 19mb/hour, saving just one little megabyte. Let's assume the average user's data plan cost about 1$ per gigabyte. Apparently, users spend about 5 hours per week on this app, let's say 20 hours per month. So we're saving 20mb/month, or 0.02 (two cents). Let's assume there are a million such users. Total, this would save 20.000 dollars per month.
Okay, now let's suppose a developer's time is worth about 100$ per hour. It would take 200 hours worth of development for the development cost to exceed the savings, or about 5 weeks.
One little megabyte for a month is worth more than a month of developer effort. And of course this is just one megabyte. If the sibling threads are any indication, a proper caching mechanism would likely save over 15Mb.
15Mb means the users are losing over 3 million dollars per year.
Honestly, this is about basic self-respect as a developer, engineer and a human being in general. If you can do the right thing, make a solid engineering decision - then you should absolutely do this instead of choosing the most lazy-ass copout. It usually doesn't take that much of a work. It takes a small choice, like not to download every fucking resource every fucking time a page is redisplayed, or something.
Software developers have a stronger obligation here just because of the scaling factor - every resource waste you outsource to your users gets multiplied by the number of users. Sure it's minuscule, but it adds up over all the other developers that don't give a crap either.
I mean, if you want to talk "contractural agreements" then please by all means do so - but be so kind and formalize the implicit assumption that the product is not intended to waste user's time and money because programmers were lazy. Give me an estimate on amount of RAM, expected net traffic and watt-hours it uses up, and if I chose to use the product, I will not complain about resource usage anymore.
And companies know well that looking nice and being "user-friendly" has a better ROI than actually doing something useful.
When that happens, governments will do the only thing they can: regulate the hell out of us. Unless maybe we regulate ourselves first.
Where do you draw the line to define 'wasting' on the expansive scale of efficiency? Past a point it doesn't make business (or technological) sense to optimise. How do you define what level of bandwidth is 'necessary'? If you're suggesting that apps should not release with obviously stupid practices then I agree with you. Past that I'd find it difficult.
They have access to this vast swath of cloud technology and a few Moores law iterations to boot yet they seem to perform worse than even WoW did on launch, with a game that is extremely forgiving to latency.
I'd love to see actual postmortems from them but I doubt we will since they've said nothing at all so far. But the authentication could easily be a problem that they're using both their own service and google for providing authentication. Since they go down each time a new region is released it would make sense that they're getting hit with lots of account creation and google API hits, the things that are likely to be the worst for scaling, since google will rate limit most clients (though I'd think they could get something worked out since it's all real traffic). Along with that, their own authentication server has gone down near release (pokemon trainer accounts) while the google one was working, so they probably have had to throw servers at that and weren't expecting to.
I'd also expect a lot of the load to be related to doing lots of geospatial queries, but I doubt they planned that badly since they had experience with ingress. I think it'd be related to the nearby pokemon feature that they've had broken since shortly after launch.
There's definitely questions (e.g. why did nearby pokemon break the way it has?) about the particular bugs that people see that make me wonder how they've handled things but i suspect we'll never know since the answers are going to whatever secret sauce they've done to handle this kind of game.
While it is always possible that they just massively suck at infrastructure, I suspect that cheating is the issue preventing more caching.
By keeping everything on their servers, the types of cheating you have to police are massively reduced.
And people who play Pokemon will do ANYTHING to catch 'em all.
There's a good chance players will click on the same pokestops again and again, so caching even just the last 50 one would be helpful.
Another user has already mentioned they don't attempt to cache image or textual information about Pokestops. Pokestops for most people are pretty recurring. This probably consume less information than the models but is also likely to be pretty static information.
Could you provide a source for this? I did some Googling but could not find any information supporting this.
I definitely agree on the Pokestop data, but I find it hard to believe that models and animations are not assets included in the app file.
If you were Niantic, and expecting Pokemon Go to be roughly as popular as Ingress, would you bother going to the effort of adding a caching layer when you could not, and expend your efforts on the front end and content, and get the release out sooner?
Because Ingress wasn't reliable either, and this way Pokémon Go has an opinion of being playable mostly when everyone else is asleep. It's only this week that I can actually run it somewhat reliably after work...
Speaking of Ingress portals - there were not much more dynamic than Pokéstops are (given that you can drop "Pokéstop modules" on them, which affect all players). This was my complaint against Ingress too - while portal state should be redownloaded continuously, the visual/information data changes infrequently to never. The name, the photo. The stuff you actually need to have to display portal details. Similarly Pokéstops. That kind of data should absolutely be cached. It cannot be used for cheating, and caching it is like elementary engineering.
I really hope the outcome is that cell companies are forced to get rid of caps but we all know how much money telecom companies donate to prevent this kind of regulation.
Usually that's what these committees do - check on variety of issues that impact their voters back home. Sometimes it can be inane, sometimes not.
But usually nothing will result from this as no bills will be proposed till after the election.
I did buy all the phones outright though, which was $2200 upfront.
EDIT: this one https://www.oister.dk/mobilabonnement/taletidsabonnementer/o... and then I took advantage of a "double your data" offering they had. It's 120DKK for 20GB, usually.
Few other apps go out of their way to make similar warnings, instead they rely on the OS to do this for you, Android at least allows you to set both a warning and a stop point for your data consumption very easily. Many mobile providers prevent surprises to their customers by sending a text at 50%, 75%, 90% and then stopping unless they reply at 100%.
To me it looks like these people are doing their job.
That said, these questions should be posed to the carriers rather than Niantic.
When people are sick of dying, some form of regulation, or at least a trusted communication channel, will likely take root. In the mean time, lots of people are going to die.
This is a heavy price. So I wonder: is this issue worth all those deaths?
That said, it's ridiculous to assume that if you do away with enforcing food safety and quality standards things will be peachy. That's not how free market works. You or your kids will likely die of poison. Because quite a lot of entrepreneurs are assholes and the only thing that stands between you and painful death are those regulations.
(Don't believe me? Do some shopping on eBay. Or better, go work for a week in a grocery store and see the shit they pull off while still staying within regulations. I'm a chatty person so I quickly make friends with people at stores, and a side benefit of that is that I get told when not to buy meat from them...)
Obviously, that is not actually true. Those regulations are a recent phenomenon. But before we had them, very few people suffered painful death from their lack.
On the other hand, they also save lives by forbidding stuff that would have killed people. Now the hard problem is to find the sweet spot where you minimised the lives lost by both over- and under-regulation. (In addition to improving the accuracy and efficiency of said regulation.)
Besides, even a little optimization can have a very large impact: https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=12135849&goto=threads%...
sustained?
burst capacity and total capacity are different.
Dear Congresspeople Pallone, DeGette, and Schakowsky,
Thank you for reaching out to us. I hope this response reaches you before the August 9, 2016, deadline.
1. Yes 2. No 3. No 4. No
Kind regards, Niantic.
How is this even a useful statement? I'm thinking that 22 minutes of video is going to be a lot more data than 43 minutes of playing a game.
side note: I hope an irritated group of howling howler monkeys shadow every speech of any politician that distributes a PDF that cannot be selected from because its a friggin image file.
7$ per month assures me of download speed 300mb/s 100mb/s upload speed and unlimited traffic on fiber. Do you have better deals guys?
First is the obvious one that your loaded question alludes to: a resistance to change because that costs so companies won't do it until it would give them a relatively easy advantage (that lasts more than a week) over their competitors.
Second: creating new infrastructure can be a lot easier than upgrading. You don't have to worry about supporting existing devices and userbase.
Third: In developing nations infrastructure projects like that are often in significant part funded by internal government funds and external aid rather than there being an expectation that commercial entities will foot the entire bill.
Mario Kart GO (ok that's a risky proposition)
Super Smash Bros Go
Zelda GO
Silent Hill GO or Resident Evil GO
Augmented reality after many years I think will change video games and how we play them. Virtually reality for me no thanks .. bulky and uncomfortable in it's current form.
Now if you could wear sun like glasses in which augments reality (see & explore a new world via these lightweight sunglasses) that would be cool!
On a side note, I'd like to add that this is an initiative from the legislative power, not the government, and that this is a discussion and not an enforcement. One of the big job of the legislative power is taking the pulse of the world to try to inform their voting on law matters. If I were libertarian, I would be really pleased to have a heads up before any law is moved in my field of activity, and knowing the move has been made after at least an enquiry has been made.
But yeah, this is silly. People have to be responsible for their own choices after some point.
And anyway, even if it were true, 10 MB/hr is nothing. That's 100 hours of playing until you reach 1 GB, which is the lowest cap I've ever heard of. Randomly browsing reddit will eat up a lot more than 10 MB/s if you're clicking on image links. Hell, there are individual gfys that are larger than 10 MB.
The thrust of the JPM piece was that there was no meaningful impact to data usage.
Well, I'll be. Poor consumers.
Ranking members Frank, Diana and Jan might be exhausting your tax dollars.
Two questions:
1. How did Congress get our note? 2. Why is Congress spending time doing this?
love, Europe
Tethering is treated differently and that does have a tougher limit but I've made my peace with that particular restriction. It only hurt me when my cable broadband became flakey and I got lazy and switched to tethering instead of fixing it. Turned out to be an OS problem.
This is yet another reminder that Serious People hate anything which is fun. If you're playing the game for hours of time, it of course uses data. Per minute, its data usage is actually rather minimal.
1. smartphones will finally have decent batteries (e.g. lasting at least 1 day for the avg PokemonGo player, aka days/weeks for the rest of the world)
2. through healthy competition, carriers hopefully stop charging ridiculous amount of money for data
3. convergence of home wifi and carriers, i.e. you can use and share your home wifi within miles from your home
</tooOptimistic>
This is blocked upon a breakthrough in battery technology, not any (in)action on the part of handset manufacturers as you are lightly implying. Drones are more my wheelhouse but phones and automobiles are similar; we've reached roughly the top end of energy density with current known technology and chemistry. The fact that your phone can talk for several hours while operating multiple radios is already quite impressive given battery size, so I'm not sure why you classify phone batteries as anything but "decent."
Pokémon Go isn't going to revolutionize our understanding of chemistry and physics, unfortunately. If you want a phone the size of an old brick you can have longer battery life, with the risk that a battery of that size will react very violently to being punctured or abused and swells frequently. Even current ones do.
(You should see my drone's LiPos after I pull them out of a particularly demanding run [i.e., sport mode]; they're often hot to the touch and swelling, and this is somewhat expected depending on circumstances. Battery health is something you have to take seriously with drone batteries because they're surprisingly sensitive and don't have a long useful life. "Invent a better battery" is a meme among drone folks.)
FTFY