You’ve probably read by now that our Android version, Onavo Lite, is in closed beta. If you were fast to respond, you might also be one of our very first beta users! In this post, a bit more technical than usual, we’ll get our feet wet with iOS and Android facts that will shed some light on why we’re doing things differently with Android and why this is good news for you, as an Android user.

There are many differences between Apple’s iOS and Android that are well known: each OS was designed and implemented in light of a unique product philosophy, affecting both the user and the developer experience. One good example of this is an app’s journey into the ecosystem: Apple’s App Store review & approval process, as opposed to Android Market’s consumer-driven, free app economy. In this post, I will touch on a more obscure aspect of the mobile operating system that also displays a difference between the rival iOS and Android: apps’ data consumption model.

iOS: Apple iOS adopted the user-driven data consumption model, which means that at any given time, mobile data is only used (with very few exceptions) by the app you, the user, are actually looking at. For us, here at Onavo, this means targeting the data itself – which is pretty much what we are doing with our iPhone/iPad app.

Android: With Android, a more app-driven data consumption model has evolved, meaning that mobile data is (primarily) used whenever apps choose to use it. Again, for Onavo this means that the first step in shrinking data & saving users money is targeting apps’ behavior and raising the users’ awareness of it.

There are several of reasons why those models are different, here are three:

1. OS design - The Android OS design makes it far easier for an app to run in the background, giving the opportunity for such an app to use available system resources at any given time, specifically – mobile data. With Apple’s iOS, apps have a much more limited lifecycle and running scope, enabling them to consume data primarily when the user is actually using them. For example: on Android, an app you installed but never use can be eating up your data plan.
2. “Adult supervision” – In Android, there are no guarantees that an app available on the Market behaves itself, data-wise or at all. This is because there is no review process for Android apps pre-market upload. iOS apps go through a (somewhat) thorough review prior to being uploaded to the App Store, a process which weeds out some irresponsible behavior on their part, including data usage related issues.
3. Centralized notification service – iOS features APNS – Apple Push Notification Service. This allows developers to implement notifications for their apps using a centralized, relatively data-light infrastructure that aggregates multiple apps’ messages, thereby consuming less data. Android does not have an equivalent service (at least not yet), pushing developers to implement such a service for themselves. This often results in repeated network operations which can get data-heavy.

Other reasons exist, but they have to do with lower-level factors that we will touch on in the future, perhaps in a more developer-oriented post.

So what does this all mean? Well, if you’re an Android user, it means that there might be a lot more going on on your smartphone than you think: substantial amounts of mobile data are consumed in the background – by apps you didn’t even know were running. This is exactly why the Onavo team has chosen to bring Onavo Lite as soon as possible: so you, as an Android user, will have a better understanding of what’s going on behind the scenes, and better tools to regain control of your mobile data. We are excited about this release, really looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

Yuval Ariav is the Chief Architect at Onavo. Have a question for Yuval? Want to know more about the differences between iOS and Android? Let us know what you think in the comments or tweet us at @onavo.