“Mitrais has been a great partner for Amethon over the past few years, taking responsibility for support and development of one product and assisting with the development of another. All of our resources have been highly professional and capable and we look forward to working with them moving forward.”

Michael Stone, CEO of Amethon

Beware of ‘Rogue’ Apps

Have you ever almost fallen on the floor from shock after receiving your smartphone account? If you answered yes, then you’re just one of the ever increasing number of people who have and chances are a ‘rogue app’ is responsible for your distress.

Just for devices running Google’s Android operating system, more than 1 billion Google Play Store Applications are being downloaded each month. With this volume, a rogue application is bound to make an appearance.

High data usage apps generate unreasonably large volumes of data usage which not only increases mobile network congestion but are most likely the cause for individual subscribers to suffer ‘bill shock’. It doesn’t stop there; high data usage apps also consume additional power within your device resulting in reduced battery life.

The majority of mobile apps are free to download and rely on mobile advertising to generate revenue for the developer. A popular word game application utilizing three different ad networks caused almost 10,000 ad images to be requested per hour over a 36 hour period. Each ad image averaging 4.5 kb, this ‘free app’ consumed more than 700 MB of data for the user over this period and was clearly not due to user interaction.

In another case investigated, a popular social networking application for iPhone users was constantly sending and receiving data over a 5 hour period in a manner that was again clearly not a result of user interaction. This was determined by the constant data rates. On this occasion the app generated more than 50MB of data and 170,000 transactions in 5 hours.

How can you find out if you have a ‘rogue app’ on your device? Call your mobile network provider? Unfortunately some mobile network providers will only advise you that the reason for your large mobile account is because of the data usage and are unable to be more specific.

However, if your mobile network provider utilises Amethon’s Mobile Analytics, they will be able to individually identify the exact usage of all your applications on your mobile device.

Amethon Mobile Analytics has already identified numerous rogue applications and the threat they pose to an individual or mobile network. If your mobile network provider doesn’t have Amethon’s Mobile Analytics, it may prove beneficial for you to move to one who does. Why pay for some ‘unknown’ data usage when you can know exactly what you’re being charged for?

The Mobile Analytics platform developed by Amethon analyses the individual data session for each application running on every subscriber device and flags applications which generate excessive data usage, high transaction volumes, long session durations or regular data pulses.

With their unique Mobile Analytics technology, Amethon are able to process and analyse billions of events per day in near real-time. They are also capable of identifying the type of smartphone, brand, model, screen size, form factor and operating system.

Amethon in partnership with Mitrais developed the technology used to monitor and analyse MMS (Multimedia Messaging Services) traffic and also the reporting method which is presented through a web based reporting portal. The key technologies used in this development were Java, Unix Shell Scripts, Jboss, Struts, MySQL, Maven and Hibernate.

Partnering with Mitrais was a new experience for Amethon as they had never contracted any external software resources before. After a recommendation by another company and the cost-effective proposal provided by Mitrais the commencement of a successful partnership began.

“Mitrais has been a great partner for Amethon over the past few years, taking responsibility for support and development of one product and assisting with the development of another. All of our resources have been highly professional and capable and we look forward to working with them moving forward,” commented Michael Stone, CEO of Amethon, when asked about his experience partnering with Mitrais.