Measure data roaming traffic on Android?

Question

Just back from a very nice vacation in Iceland, and await the data roaming bill from my phone company. I hope for the best having limited my traffic as much as possible, but I want to know in advance. I used the very nice app NetCounter but it didn't measure roaming data traffic at all.

So I want to build my own app measuring just roaming data traffic. I have a few booleans to start with ( NetworkInfo.IsRoaming() & TelephonyManager.isNetworkRoaming() ), but I'm not sure how to measure the traffic if true.

So the question is: How do I measure data traffic while roaming? (Something like API level 8 TrafficStats functionality is what I'm after, but for API level 3). The used SmartPhone is Samsung Galaxy i7500 (Android 1.6)

Thanx for your time!

Answer 1

Method 1. Parse "/proc/net/dev".

In my phone it looks like:

Inter-|   Receive                                                |  Transmit
 face |bytes    packets errs drop fifo frame compressed multicast|bytes    packets errs drop fifo colls carrier compressed
    lo:     712       8    0    0    0     0          0         0      712       8    0    0    0     0       0          0
dummy0:       0       0    0    0    0     0          0         0        0       0    0    0    0     0       0          0
rmnet0:       0       0    0    0    0     0          0         0        0       0    0    0    0     0       0          0
rmnet1:       0       0    0    0    0     0          0         0        0       0    0    0    0     0       0          0
rmnet2:       0       0    0    0    0     0          0         0        0       0    0    0    0     0       0          0
 wlan0:  146112     423   32    0    0     0          0         0    42460     409    0    0    0     0       0          0

In my phone the "rmnet0" row is the one that holds the stats for mobile line internet. I hope its format does not vary among kernel versions.

Method 2: Parse "/sys/class/net".

I guess this is the recommended method. As shown here: http://www.jaqpot.net/svn/android/netcounter/trunk/src/net/jaqpot/netcounter/service/SysClassNet.java

Answer 2

There are a couple of open-source options that have been mentioned in the comments:

• NetCounter
• NetMeter

The one I presently have installed is 3G Watchdog. There are a few comments by the author on AndroLib suggesting that he is reluctant to release the source code, but with some aid from the community, I'm sure we could all collaborate to make the best data usage app out there.

I think the best solution would be to take the code from NetMeter and have a service run in the background. 3G Watchdog does this (the service is called net.NetMonitorService).