Hi all,
just wanted to start a thread about my first app development job, to inform you I have made the heavy lift (hopefully!) for having most of the fundamental features in place to bring such a functionality to the Ubuntu Touch OS.
The link to my Gitlab repository page is: dataMonitor app, where it is saved the most up to date .click version 0.1.2 (in the folder /build/app).
The very latest commit is important because it is regarding fixing the bug about received bytes from the SIM connection not detected (wi-fi received data monitoring was working since the beginning).
I'd need some help to find out if it is working for you as it is working for me, but please bear in mind the app is UNCONFINED and runs a daemon on the background, so, you never know, better to install it, if you are willing to help, on a test device and not on a daily driver.

I also would like to use this thread to invite the UT community to share ideas and feature requests to improve this app and having it in a better shape to be eventually ready to be published in the OpenStore or integrated in the OS.
I was similarly involved and committed to help with the Linphone app developed by @CiberSheep and Brian and it was a great experience, very exciting and rewarding even if I didn't contribute very much at its development.
I started to work on this app because I felt a modern OS as UT cannot lack in this regard. Also, I read several times on this Forum and on Telegram about people asking for it or complaining for this lack; unfortunately, sometimes the reply to those people was that sure, the data usage monitoring app was missing in the UT OS but they could easily ask their SIM Provider to provide information as a workaround, which I felt a bit unhelpful and insufficient: I don't know your case but in my Country I cannot trust Providers, they are quite nifty so in my humble opinion it is very important to have the ability to monitor the received data on our own, to check on our Providers.

Thank you in advance.

Matteo

P.S. here below some screenshots of the app running on my phone.

@kugiigi I saw a video of yours showcasing all the stuff you created and shared in the main telegram group because I found all of that so great! I would like to use ALL of them but I'm afraid to break my phone which is my daily driver, therefore I can only wait for you to propose them to be included mainstream, on Gitlab/Github. Since I find your work on UT so precious and valuable, once I'll be able to use your stuff I have the intention to provide you with a little offer, as I did for other developers, such as Alfred for instance, who made great things and deserve to be a little bit financed. Thanks Kugi and keep going with bringing UT always further and further

Hi All,
just to revive this thread, I'd like to inform the Community that the dataMonitor app, object of the present thread, is still in heavy development by me but right now I'm committed in fixing some little glitches and bringing in UI improvements before to update it again on Gitlab to the last version. This version will be a big one, since it will also bring some gestures I worked on during this time I missed from the present thread.
I'd like to share with you some pics of the very latest build:

New app version 0.1.9.9 with .click files for arm64 and armhf architectures are now available here.
Find below the current change log:

-Version 0.1.9.9-

1. Message bubble implemented for the graph, to display data usage for each data bar, just tapping on the concerned bar. This is deliberately taken from the Talaan app made by Kugi Eusebio @javacookies. Thanks Kugi for your work.

2. Main page and Chart page are now able to update theirs figures and chart automatically (every 10 seconds), the latter without the recourse to an update button, implementing the .qml 'Timer' cycle in the code. Because of that, for Chart page the update button on the top right hand side of it was deleted.

3. Added mattdaemon status in the Indicator panel to acknowledging if the daemon is Active or Inactive.

4. Refresh time in mattdaemon.conf file is set to 10 seconds (former 40 seconds) to be the app default update time step. With such modification the data usage is updated more frequently so that data not accounted for is more unlikely to occur and moreover battery drain doesn't seem to be much affected.

5. Refresh time for dataMonitor Indicator is set to 10 seconds (former 30 seconds) to be better aligned to Main page app refresh time.

6. Added a stop command to stop the mattdaemon daemon when uninstalled from Settings, to force it being inactive.

7. Fix for actiondaemon.cpp file for appropriate data storage, when the device is kept alive continuously for more than one day.

8. Exceeded data threshold notification is now translatable.

Any feedback on the current status of the app is always welcome.

Kindly note that the present version is the last test version and starting since the next one, i.e. the 0.2.0, you'll hopefully find it published in the OpenStore. What is now missing is only the artwork (to be clear the new app icon as minimum) which will probably not take me too much to implement it thanks to @C0n57an71n work). Thanks to the people who supported me in this journey, which was painful and instructive to me at the same time. See you in the OpenStore! Cheers.

Matteo

@mymike I'm late to the party but I wish only to say: great job Michele! I like very much how you designed the breakdown of stored data for each app; the idea of proportional bars and the data characterization by different colors is just brilliant. Thank you and keep up the good work

@Stefano I also once changed the baseband following the guide on this forum but I didn't notice such an improvement. To be honest I didn't test it so heavily so thank you Stefano to have made us aware of that, I'll certanly flash it back and pay more attention to the behavior. As a final comment, I'd say that if confirmed to be worth the upgrade, it would be great if the latest firmware would be included in the UT image.

I read your post and I felt your pain, which is mine too. I agree with you with the fact that many little bugs ( some of the bugs you reported don't seem to me very little BTW) could have been tackled before. However, we are a small community, and only a bunch of devs among all the community people are active in the development and we cannot expect miracles from them. For this reason, personally I'm struggling to find my way to help the development to improve, with the goal to start from the little bugs. I'm not a dev, I know some coding languages, but never developed for a phone OS. Like me, other people are trying to ride the same route with similar objectives. In the end, in my humble opinion, something is moving in the background, and maybe soon (that's my hope!) there will be self-taught devs who will be able to make this OS always better and better. For all the interested people, we have a discussion group on matrix named Bootcamp, where all the beginners are more than welcome

@rinigus I will try to help you out to package it if none of the most experienced UBports developers will show up....only, this is my last week at work and after I'll have plenty of time next week to dedicate at this scope. I'm not a great developer but I know a little how to package things with clickable even if I didn't manage yet to download and include third party packages in the clickable package, up to now.
Don't worry, somehow we will be your hands and your eyes, in order to have your great app set and working on this platform

@Lakota I have BQ Aquaris E5. I installed also Gimp and it seems working good.

@mariogrip All the best wishes to you and your family. The Community needs you in the best shape to move the project further and further but remember that life and family always come first.

@wangqinfeng what do you mean by the "Real Machine"? If you mean the UT phone, then probably you'd need to include in your .apparmor file the adequate policy group to grant permission to access the root folder. Have a look at the Apparmor Policy Groups to find out more.

@Gernulf hi and thanks @Keneda for highlighting me this thread. I'm the developer of the app Keneda already sent the link to you. This app was originally developed to fill a gap in UT and I believe I accomplished to my own goal, as a minimum target. In the app, you will find the basic functionalities you might expect but not the chance to set the starting day for monitoring data or to reset the count. This is on my list though and I'll bring it in future to my app but cannot tell you when, right now. Problem is new UT version came out, i.e. 20.04, and until I cannot get that on my Pixel 3a, because that is my only phone and my daily driver so that I have to wait this becoming stable enough, I'll not be in the position to further work on my app. In addition, my intention is to embed this app straight into the OS instead of being a downloadable app from the store, so I need a strategy to implement that as well. Hope you'll enjoy my app and find it useful. Regards. Matteo

Sad about this news, I always thought you @UniSuperBox were one of the pillars of this project. However it was evident something was happening behind the scenes, because your interventions were always rare and rare. I hope you'll recover soon and health must be always in a due care, so take your time with no rush. Of course I hope you'll eventually come back, much stronger than before ;). Anyways, please consider my personal side thought: you are still young and you have had the envied position of being contracted and earn some money doing what you like doing the most (at least you always seemed so passionate about this job). I'm a chemical engineer and I find my daily job boring because there isn't creativity nor fantasy at all in what I do. In your job instead, at which you are skilled and talented without any doubt, you have the chance to count, to steering where the project is going and to put your creativity at Community service. None of you devs was ever supposed to get burning out, this is a volunteer project. Sometimes I just feel you devs want to do too much but bear in mind you don't owe anything to the Community, because you are delivering code for free and things can be moved forward at slow pace, the pace that most suits to you.
Said that, have a rest dear Dalton and see you soon

I just updated the app on my Gitlab repository (link to this you can find in the first post). The most important feature for me is the introduction of the notifications, which are now triggered in case of exceeding data thresholds. The full change log is below:

-Version 0.1.6-

1. A new icon has been introduced with the present release (I'm not a great artist so this could be a temporary solution in case somebody else would come up with a better idea);

2. Added notifications in case of data thresholds exceeding. The code employs the C++ function 'popen' which apparently is the only one I discovered to work seamlessly without killing the daemon ('system' and 'QProcess' were the other two methods tried before);

3. Added summary at the Main.qml page for SIM and Wi-fi data;

4. Added the "info" section on the up right corner, close to "settings";

5. Merged early translation to spanish thanks to @Krakakanov (new additional strings to be translated have been added since then);

6. Added translation to italian thanks to...me;

7. Added gestures to interact with the graph:

   • Scroll down/up with two fingers to enlarge/narrow the 'MBytes' data range;

   • Press and hold with one finger to create a new data threshold object;

8. Added 'BottomEdge' section to store the list of the created data thresholds. In this section you can:

   • Drag the data threshold row towards right, to delete the data threshold;

   • Drag the data threshold row towards left, to mute the notification for the concerned threshold;

9. Added labels for 'Mbytes' and 'Days of Month';

10. Fixed 'Mbytes' data steps to be consistent between the Vertical and Horizontal view and to fill all the space at its disposal;

11. Fixed bug occurring when the date passed from one day to the day after, not calculating the received data in a correct way;

12. Added message on the middle of the page to inform about data unavailability when opening a graph with no data yet;

13. Added message on the middle of the 'BottomEdge' page to inform about thresholds unavailability when no data thresholds yet.

@magnargj and @trwidick sorry to say but right now I don't own anymore a working Linux PC, since it left me without internet connection, caused probably by wi-fi card hitting its end of life. Therefore it's a road-blocker for me and I can't keep development of app at pace as I wanted to do. First, I need to order a new Linux PC, then flash my brand new Pixel 3a and then I'll be back on track. Hopefully after Summer holidays I'll find a solution. Just wanted to assure that I'm not leaving development for present and other apps, my intention is to stay with UT for a long time, to the infinity and beyond ;P. Thank you for your interest in my app.

Kind regards,

Matteo

@Plarde I just downloaded the app and my first impression is that it's great! Kudos to you for the effort you made, really worth it. At a first sight, but as a disclaimer I might have not spent enough time in this app yet, it seems that if I zoom in to enlarge the words size the tool to draw and highlight text just disappears and I'm not able to use that. Potentially it's a great app indeed

@prog-amateur It happens also to me sometimes on my Meizu Pro5. What phone version do you own by the way? The chinese version? To be sure on the model, if you turn around your phone, on the back side you should find written the model (mine is TD-LTE). Which channel are you on? Stable? Try also to move to a different channel - Stable, Release Candidate, Developer - to see if something changes (go to Settings->Updates->updates settings->Channels).

@stefano thanks anyways. I didn't open a bug report on GH yet because I'm not sure if this is related to the Ubuntu Touch OS itself or if this is peculiar of my phone only. I have the evidence that other people with fresh UT installation on pro5 don't suffer for the bugs I'm experiencing.

@C0n57an71n hey Constantin, I looked at your work with the icons and I'm really impressed. In case you were interested in designing an icon for my app, I'd really appreciate, since I'm terrible at designing icon. Details about my app are here ---> dataMonitor. Unfortunately the latest app version isn't working as expected due to issues collected working on it blindfolded while I wasn't owning an UT compatible device (still waiting for a PinePhone to come), therefore I probably am not able to work on it anytime soon. So, I'm just suggesting this at your convenience, with no pressure nor rush. The icon I made was just supposed to be temporary and I got the intention to replace it once the major technical issues resulted overcome as the minimum goal (I think I'm close to that goal by the way). Thank you in advance Matteo

@doniks unfortunately the Telegram available for Ubuntu Touch doesn't have voice call yet, because it is different from the Android version and not supported by the Telegram developers....it will probably have it in the future but maybe not very soon.