Onavo is a relatively new iOS app. The app purports to show you detailed statistics on your 3G/4G/LTE data usage. It will show you exactly how much data each app uses on a week by week basis and in a 30-day overview chart. These statistics are meant to help you figure out where your data plan is going.
The Good News
This app does exactly what it advertises. It shows you what data your apps are using in a clean and easy to use interface. This is exactly what I’ve been looking for for a long time and I’m glad somebody finally did it and did it elegantly.
The Bad News
The usage data isn’t updated in real time. I couldn’t nail down exactly how long the delay is, but it seemed to be between a few hours and a day for the usage data to update. Some clarification from the developer on this would be good or better yet an improvement to realtime reporting.
The app could use some minor functionality improvements like being able to account for the fact that my data bucket resets on the 11th of the month. The current week by week charts and 30-day summary are great but I suspect many people are ike me that have their data buckets reset on an odd day in the month therefore if the app could take that into account it would be brilliant.
Data beyond 30-days is unavailable. An ability to compare this month to last month would be a great addition.
Onavo also caused problems with my wireless carrier’s My Account app. My carrier is Rogers Wireless in Canada and their My Account app relies on the phone communicating directly with their data network to authenticate the device against the account. Since Onavo re-directs traffic through their servers for counting purposes, it broke Rogers’ My Account app. However being on a WiFi network breaks Rogers’ My Account app so I don’t fully fault Onavo for this issue.
These are all relatively minor issues and not at all deal breakers for me, particularly in a v1 app. I’m sure the developers will be working on these features or ones like it. Therefore I could happily continue using the app in-spite of these minor issues. Alas, it doesn’t end there…
The Deal Breaker
Speed is a critical factor for me and the ability to get onto the significantly faster LTE network is one of the key reasons I upgraded to an iPhone 5. Now I am not naive enough to expect no slowdown when using an app like Onavo. I did expect some sort of reduction in connection speed since the data does have to flow through their servers to be counted, but lets see just how much of a slowdown Onavo caused. Here are the results of successive speed tests:
Onavo Status: Enabled
Download Speed: 4.42 MBps
Upload Speed: 11.93 MBps
Onavo Status: Disabled
Download Speed: 15.92 MBps
Upload Speed: 21.44 MBps
Onavo Status: Deleted Profile and ran a Reset Network Settings
Download Speed: 20.58 MBps
Upload Speed: 22.54 MBps
Note: All of these tests were run with the Speedtest.net app, they were all run on the Rogers LTE network and were run to the same test server which is a local test server to me (Burnaby) within a short timespan of one another so as to reduce the potential of network interference causing the problem.
As you can see, Onovo significantly slowed down my connection speed. Even disabling it did not bring me back to full speed. That required a delete of the Onavo profile and a reset of network settings. To be fair to Onavo, they do note that simply disabling it may not be sufficient and that a delete of the profile and a reset of network settings may be needed to fully remove the app and its affects. So I give them points for giving clear instructions on how to fully remove their app.
As I said before, I did expect to suffer some small slowdown when using Onavo; however, a slowdown of 75% (from more than 20 MBps down to less than 5 MBps) is simply too much. Therefore I will have to stop using the service which is sad.
Onavo and Visual Voicemail
One other note that may be helpful to folks, based on my testing the initial version of Onavo was the cause of some massive problems with my Visual Voicemail. The initial version changed your phone’s APN settings, instead of adding a VPN which is what the current version does. With that initial version, my visual voicemail would constantly give me an error of “Voicemail Unavailable: Unable to initiate connection.” That seemed to be mostly fixed in the current version which uses a VPN instead of APN settings change, but it should be noted for those people who are suffering from this issue that Onavo may be the cause of your Visual Voicemail breaking.
Recommendation
The speed issue is unfortunately a deal breaker for me. Accordingly I am giving this app 3 stars. I love the idea and the implementation is elegant, however the developers have some more work to do and a significant speed issue to resolve before I can use it full time. Should they improve the speed in the future and add some of the functions I spoke about, I will be happy to give it another try.