So there I was, doing my nerdly things and checking data usage of individual apps… when I noticed something wild.
I had spent a day hacking on my spark cores and was using the Android app to “provision” the wifi credentials.
My jaw dropped when I noticed the #1 usage of data on my Android phone wasn’t Facebook, wasn’t Twitter, etc… it was the Spark Tinker App.
Thankfully, it was WIFI access, but I don’t know what the spark app is doing to use 250mb of data in a week… It’s not that much data in the grand scheme of things, but considering that I was only provisioning WIFI credentials, I thought it sounded a touch high…
Oh that’s interesting! We do know the smart config step “blasts” a bunch of packets on the wifi network while configuring the core, maybe that’s it? Fortunately that would mean it should never do this over cellular data. The usage pattern shows clear large vertical jumps, indicating large brief transmissions. Does that sound right?
I haven’t debugged any more information, just noticed this and thought about bringing it up… I don’t have my cores with me right now, but I think next week I should be able to debug this a bit more (at least repeat the test)…
Eeek. I just did a check and sure enough, the Spark app has racked up 709MB on my phone on WiFi. This is from 25th June to 2nd of July. I changed the range to 1 and 2 July and it is 528MB.
This seems very excessive to me. What exactly is the application doing?
I am going to grab the app and see what it is doing when running under the Android debugger.
My guess is the UDP broadcasts during the smart config process. By its nature, it should be a brief broadcast / transmission that is only routed locally, so it should stay entirely within your network.
