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Comment by stanmancan | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

Well, yes -- but the letter is to Niantic, not carriers.

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.

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!

Regardless of the pricing, the onus is still on the customer to understand the service they are using in my opinion.

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.

I don't disagree that the customer needs to be more aware, but the gym analogy doesn't quite work. The risks of dropping a 100kg weight on yourself are much more transparent than an app sneakily loading unnecessary data and not caching it.

Yeah it does seem that analogy isn't holding up. Perhaps a better analogy is monthly gas bills. It isn't immediately obvious how much running the gas hot water service will cost, but some cursory research would point you in the right direction.

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.

The weights in the gym are labelled. Mobile games are not labelled with their data usage, nor do they track it themselves (although a phone will usually track it for you).

People can understand it, but they usually don't habitually check it, resulting in surprise bills.

Definitely a fair criticism of the analogy, and I think itnis fair to ask for more transparency from app vendors. I just don't think they should be held liable monetarily.

Some angry support tickets might be warranted though!

What the hell are you talking about? The weights are clearly labeled and you know what's up before you even attempt it. With data, not only are there multiple abstractions away from the consumer which all play in using and controlling the data used, the phone companies purposely don't provide a data cap lock in some cases. And then you get singled out and have to grovel for forgiveness. Having software metering at device level and and phone company level should be mandatory.

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.

Yeah the gym analogy didn't work. My point was simply that the gym isn't responsible should you do something stupid, because there is plenty of ways to educate yourself on avoiding that.

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.

The one month that I had capped mobile data, they sent me texts as soon as I got close to hitting said cap, and then for every GB I went over (oi m8, buy a bundle, ur gettin wreck'd by our prices)

Pricing based on "value" not "cost" is a fairly common business advice mantra. Where value tends to be what you can get away with based on lack of competition.

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.

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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.

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.

> 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.

The game is a descendant of Ingress, so anyone familiar with the latter should at least have a feel on how much data it uses. Also, it's obviously a multiplayer game (even if the multiplayer aspect is limited), and it shows you the map of the real world, which kind of sets an expectation of it downloading data...

...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.

> anyone familiar with [Ingress] should at least have a feel on how much data [Pokemon Go] uses

Most of the people playing Pokemon have probably never heard of Ingress.

I agree that it could use a lot more caching, though!

The thing is, it's a descendant of Ingress, but it feels like a cheap clone. It seems to be worse in some regards. I think Ingress does cache the photos it uses for portals. Pokemon Go is tremendously resource-hungry; I can play Ingress fine on my Moto G, but PGo's stated memory requirements are far larger, it crashes regularly (about every 5-10 minutes), and it gets very warm in the process. And the Pokedex is completely broken.

>Why are you comparing playing a game to browsing a website? These are entirely unrelated activities with different expectations.

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.

Fundamentally there cannot be any kind of expectation regarding bandwidth usage that a customer can reasonably have as even experts would need to analyse the source code first before they could reach a conclusion if excessive data is loaded needlessly to provide the user experience.

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.

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.

> 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?

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.

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.)

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

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).

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?

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