Click here to download Device Analyzer from the Android Market now!
Device Analyzer collects usage statistics in the background while you use your phone.
This data is stripped of personally identifying information as best as possible while preserving useful information.
Periodically the recorded data is uploaded to our server at the University of Cambridge, where we will aggregate it with
other people's data and draw inferences from the patterns that emerge.
This is a real-time map of devices as they upload data to the university's server:
This map does not reveal identities of individual contributors nor does it provide arbitrary geographical resolution.
What's in for me?
- Personal analytics - extracting data from the things we do every day, e.g. phone calls or our movement patterns - is becoming increasingly popular. We provide you with new ways to look at what is happening inside your mobile phone!
- The website allows you to download all the raw data we collect from your phone
- There are some basic analytics at the moment but development is ongoing and more will follow soon:
- For example, we can recommend you the best phone plan based on your historical usage
- or recommend apps that you may be interested in based on which apps you use the most.
- New features will use historic data and so it's worth starting to collect now!
Why do we collect your data?
Perhaps surprisingly, it is not well understood what people do with their smart phones.
Which of the many features do you use? And how often? Do you often miss calls? How many text messages do you send?
Mobile phone carriers know your calling patterns but often don't make them available to manufacturers.
They in turn conduct interviews and surveys to see what people like about their phones and what they use them for,
but these are always limited to a relatively small group of people.
Device Analyzer performs rigorous, automatic collection. It doesn't get tired after a week of recording what you have done and can provide a large and detailed data set covering a broad audience. We will use this data set to make recommendations for the improvement of future smart phones, extract patterns and trends and will let you benefit from our insights with cool new statistics and recommendations based on what other people do.
With your permission, we would like to share your data set with other researchers worldwide so that they can get even more from it! If you don't want that you can just let us know with a single click and your data will only be used within the University of Cambridge.
What is collected?
Here is an overview of the types of data we collect:
- when you turn on your phone or charge it
- when you make phone calls and send texts
- which apps you use
- wifi and bluetooth devices near your phone
- your coarse (network-based location)
You can reach the authors of Device Analyzer for comments or suggestions at dtg-android at cl.cam.ac.uk