Two Million Saved

Back in April of last year, I noted that my LifeSaver 2 app had saved a million call records and SMS texts into the cloud. Now it’s two million, and by a much more useful measure. But there’s more work to do and it’s going to be fun.

First of all, people upload a lot more stuff than they download. I’m betting it’s because they forget that LifeSaver only saves your data for an hour or two, and don’t have the new device handy in the time window, so they have to re-upload.

So, as of today, people have restored 2,033,635 phonecall records and SMS texts from the cloud to Android devices. Which makes me happy.

The average number of restores per user is pretty high. One reason is that your typical Android user is apparently walking around with over a thousand SMS messages on their device. On top of that, I know for a fact that LifeSaver’s users include a few Android alternate-system hackers who are always reflashing their devices and like to use LifeSaver for parking their histories while they do that.

Fixups · Right now, LifeSaver authenticates to App Engine with my AERC library, which relies on a low-rent poorly-documented authentication mechanism. It’d be nice to move this over Real Soon Now to Google Cloud Endpoints, which will integrate smoothly with the new OAuth2 goodies in Android’s Google Play Services.

But maybe not. I’m looking at the Google Drive API and trying to figure out how to use that from Android. Because I think the right thing to do is to have LifeSaver back up and restore your personal telephone history using your own personal Google Drive. Then you can look at it online, or delete it, or leave it there forever, or whatever. And I can stop operating a cloud database full of other people’s secrets.

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