Following my previous post Mobile, data plans and the digital divide, what can we, as mobile software product developers, do to help with the problem of cost of ownership that result in a digital divide?
The answer is that we must be smart and considerate about the cost of ownership of mobile applications. An obvious candidate is to minimize bandwidth usage. In some cases using bandwidth indiscriminately can be a liability as people not prepared to pay for data usage (and who don’t understand the connected nature of mobility) will either complain or default; to the point of legal action. And this applies to both local and web-based applications. If you are targeting a demographic that is cost-conscious, always prompt and warn the user at least once before connecting to the Internet.
One technique to consider for local applications is to segment the application in a way that some of its assets are local for the purpose of minimizing latency (and provide a good experience), yet retrieve other assets on-demand (for example, see my article Implementing a Local Cache to Manage Resources).
Other tips include the use of application assets that are created with mobile in mind; this is, at the cost of visual aesthetics avoid or minimize the use of special effects or encodings that increases footprint, such as transparency, shadows, colors, gradients, file encodings — don’t use heavy assets if you don’t have to. For mobile web applications, the same mobile-in-mind asset techniques just mentioned apply as well, as well as how often those are consumed. And remember that the use of AJAX techniques could result in more bandwidth utilization if used improperly.
When creating your application create a data-usage map, that allows you to clearly understand and articulate the network utilization and cost of your application (session, monthly); always know and be prepared to disclose this. Same with messaging (as in text)-usage and related costs.
And of course the above wouldn’t be an issue if we all had flat-rates. As I wrote before, flat-rates will increase wireless data usage and thus revenues. Affordable wireless data (i.e. beyond texting) will help minimize the mobile digital divide.
Related to this see:
