Dr. Tariff (3 months later) - you can pick up the tariff in 80 regions of Russia on Android and iOS

3 months from the start of the project Dr. Tariff was not in vain! We significantly improved the design and capabilities of the Android version , added most of the tariffs across all regions of the Russian Federation to the database, and also made an alpha release for iPhone .

For those who do not know: Dr. Tariff is a free assistant that analyzes the statistics of your conversations and selects the ideal tariff plan. Once launched, the application will examine in detail the history of your conversations and other costs to tell if you can spend less. Recently, the application has fixed in the TOP-3 free applications on Finance in Google Play.

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Learn about how Dr. Tariff began to help people save on mobile costs in the previous post . Today I want to share with you the key changes and offer to take feasible participation in the project. So, let's begin.

Habr effect

After two bans, our first post on Habré for one day gained more than 40 thousand views, which increased the user base from 7 to 14 thousand people. This was the first server baptism of the server and it can be considered that he successfully coped with it. A few days later we climbed from the 10th to the 3rd place in finance and stayed there for several weeks. After that, we went into development and rolled back somewhere up to the 20th place, until Google added us to its “Play Choice”, which again brought us back to the already familiar 3rd place.

As the number of users and the size of the database grew, performance began to rest on the hard disk. Previously, a conventional 1TB HDD with a spindle speed of 7200 was used. The problem was solved by switching to a 120GB SSD drive and in normal mode, the active time dropped to 1 percent, and the database began to work faster and smarter. There were no other changes in the server hardware.

At the moment, the size of anonymous database is 27GB. Most of the space is approximately equally divided into three tables: calls, SMS, GPRS. The number of users is 65,000. The number of calls is 27 million, the number of SMS is 28 million.

We want to thank the user community for the active feedback, which sent further application development.

Completion of the Android version

First of all, we made a complete redesign of the application:



Next, we expanded the options for adjusting balance widgets (dimensions, transparency, color change, showing bonus minutes), and also added statistics on the account balance:



The big quest was the parsing of 250 sites of operators, taking into account the fact that in different branches the structure of sites differs. Now we have posted about 40% of the tariffs of the new regions on the server, the rest will be available soon. In parallel, we decided to master the methods of working with personal accounts of mobile operators and to enable users of other mobile platforms to optimize their communication costs.

Hello, App Store!

Of course, they decided to start with iPhone users. I had to urgently buy a device from Apple and begin to dive into the details of the App Store with an analysis of the competitive environment and success factors. From the development point of view, it is extremely inconvenient to be unable to quickly update the application (5 working days) and respond to user comments (we already wrote about the inaccessibility of the call log and user messages — otherwise the application would appear on iOS from the very beginning).

The first factor influenced the choice towards the development of the main part of the application on HTML5 - otherwise the slightest change in the login algorithm would lead to an application that did not work during the week. We decided to eliminate the second factor at the expense of the feedback button and active customer support. So, this is what happened with us :



After we laid out the alpha version, a huge problem emerged - it turns out that the personal accounts of the operators differ significantly. The indignation of users immediately resulted in angry comments and poor ratings. The current version is of course still very cheese, but we are doing everything possible to correct the situation in the near future.

How can you help the project?

1. The project is now progressing through the word of mouth, so if you think Dr. Tariff interesting and useful application tell about it to your friends, thereby giving them a few thousand rubles.
2. If you are iPhone users and your region is still unavailable, but you have registered in the system, then this already helps us to debug work with personal accounts in your region faster.
3. The application provides buttons for sending messages through social networks, you can also share news from our groups:
vk.com/DrTariff
facebook.com/groups/DrTariff/
twitter.com/DrTariff

Together - we are force!