Google Datally

~ the obit ~

datally was made for somebody else's mobile data plan. in 2017 i was 33 in ankara, on unlimited home fiber and a turkcell plan that did not bother me about how much background traffic an app was doing in the kitchen. datally was an android utility that metered and blocked per-app data usage. its target audience was the next billion users that google's product org had been chasing since around 2015. that was a real google org name, the team had built triangle, the philippines-only beta that became datally.

the app shipped worldwide on november 28 2017 with the rename from triangle. the english-language tech press treated it as a curiosity, the indian press treated it as an actual product. the design ran a local vpn endpoint on the phone so the os routed every other app's traffic through datally first. that let google show you exactly which app was burning your data tap each hour and block background data per app one at a time. the philippines beta had numbers in the press release, users had been saving about 30 percent on monthly data with the app installed (close enough).

the indian rollout was the real point. android in india had been doubling year over year through the jio launch in 2016 and the cheap-handset wave that came with it. a $50 android phone on a 1gb monthly prepaid plan was the south asian smartphone of 2017. datally helped that user run instagram and whatsapp without burning the whole plan on the first wednesday. for a year or so the app sat in the top 10 free productivity tools on the indian play store.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it was for ~

this part you had to be in india for, and i was not. the philippines beta in june 2017 had been a real test of whether someone on a small mobile plan would install another app to manage that plan. the answer was yes, with caveats. users wanted the per-app data visibility, they did not love the always-on vpn the app needed to do the metering. for some reason that the next billion users team kept iterating on, the vpn dependency was a permanent friction point in user reviews from the philippines beta forward.

the wifi finder feature was added in early 2018. honestly, that was the part with the most cultural reach in the regional press coverage. datally would show user-rated free wifi hotspots near you on a map. it sat next to the per-app data view as a "use less mobile data" tool. the brand reach was strong enough that datally was occasionally cited in the indian mainstream press as a verb. for whatever reason that pattern did not stick globally.

~ what really happened ~

the death was quiet. google pulled the app from the play store on october 16 2019 without a deprecation post. android police caught the absence the same day and the killedbygoogle list added the entry within the week (close enough). users with the app already installed kept it running for as long as they did not upgrade to android 10. mobile plans in india kept getting cheaper through 2019 and 2020 as jio and the price war it kicked off pushed unlimited 4g into the bottom of the prepaid market.

datally is the killedbygoogle entry that died because the surrounding ecosystem changed rather than because google lost interest in it. the problem it had been built to solve in 2017 was already smaller by 2019, and android 10's vpn behavior change was an easy excuse to step away. the next billion users group itself was folded into the broader google search and android org over 2020 and 2021. kormo jobs and other emerging-markets products from the same team followed datally to the play store removal queue.

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