When the original idea was conceived all those years ago, i would never of thought how long and tricky the journey would be to get the idea live but hey i suppose if it was easy everyone would be doing it...
So we are now live with "Rock your phone", if you search for "CheckNED" you will find our app. Its free to use for the first 10 days.
The original idea was obviously to release this into the Apple app store but as we are using a couple of undocumented APIs they weren't too keen to publish the app! After a few "steve Jobs" type emails i was contacted by a helpful guy from their international relations dept suggesting we drop an official request for the two APIs to be added to the approved list. Which we did, but i did see in a couple of forum posts that this process is likely to take a while - so best not to hold my breath!
Apple
Its going to be interesting to see how Apple approaches this topic of cell reception "transparency", as i would hope they would see this as a great opportunity to lead the market in openly communicating the signal received by their handset from the carrier. This would put pressure on the other handset manufacturers to do the same. This will take a new twist in the states when a new carrier stocks the Iphone in the not too distant future, although anyone who has already unlocked their iphone can already experience the cell performance difference between the carriers - this is why we created the "comparison" mode in the app to make this aspect very simple for the user to quickly and easily understand the difference between carriers performance around how much 3g you experience and the % of time your iphone experiences no coverage, 1>5 bars.
Carrier view
From a carrier point of view this app creates a few challenges for them! As there has never been an independent (customer) view of cell reception before. Carriers often talk about their network being 99.9% effective in call delivery, this obviously is correct from a network point of view but as we have all experienced at some time this isn’t necessarily a true reflection of the customer experience. Customers only indication on cell performance has been referring to the carriers coverage maps (which are only based on each carriers internal algorithmic calculations on expected coverage). So if a customer gets their new iphone home and finds that they have limited or no coverage, they now have an app to help them prove their case.
Users of the app can also make a note of the cell ID (from the app collecting page) they are receiving the poor signal or drop calls so they can tell the carrier where to focus their efforts to improve the reception.
Latest Iphone release
For me this has become even more important since Apple released the latest ios4 version with the "amended" signal performance bars, which tells an even more depressing (but realistic) story of coverage for the user! With our comparison tests we could easily see a significant drop in perceived coverage problems. Also for some reason as has been mentioned on several forums Apple has removed the "field test" mode. This is obviously not a problem for CheckNED users as we show the key data via the "collecting page", showing decibel to bars displayed.
In action
Currently users can share their cell reception images via our checkned/forum, which gives an initial view of the experience. But static images don't fully demonstrate the tracking benefit when using the app. So we are planning to create a few videos for utube to show a 3g, 3gs and iphone4 handset all running the app at the same time to show the performance differences. It would be great if our customers who are already using the app could do the same! As we are really interested to build a picture of the difference in cell reception performance between the states and Europe.
