Today, I am proud to announce the release of Bandwidth Monitor version 3.0.0. After more than a year of development, the app is more modern and feature-rich than ever before. If you cannot wait to try it out, head over to the App Store.
Bandwidth 3.0 on iPhone and iPad
Below, you’ll find a more technical look at the new version.
Version 3.0
First, the most significant change is the introduction of a payed subscription tier. This subscription includes more specialized features for heavy users while all current features remain free. New features include a logarithmic Y-axis scaling, or showing the different categories of data that make up your bandwidth usage. You’ll find an overview of the Pro features before buying them in-app.
I did not make this change lightly, as I expect some users to be unhappy with it. However, the development cost of the app over the years hasn’t been insignificant. This way, I hope to have a justification to keep improving the app for everyone.
Second, feature-wise, the app now includes a lot of much-requested features. The most important one is widget support. The deprecated “today widget” has been missed by a lot of users, and since iOS 17 allows for users to refresh widgets more often and comes with the SwiftCharts framework, it was now technically possible to bring widgets back to Bandwidth.
Using SwiftCharts also gave the graphs a complete visual and technical overhaul, making them look more beautiful than ever. Switching to this framework allows for interactivity within the graphs as well, allowing you to swipe over them to see details of the data points quickly. The charts can also split up the reported bandwidth into their categories, which are Internet and IPTV for downstream, and Realtime, High, Default and Low for upstream. In addition, you can enable logarithmic scaling on the Y-axis.
Third, in terms of the technical foundation, the app architecture has been rewritten to be a pure SwiftUI app. While in version 2, most of the views were already rendered using that framework, now the entire app lifecycle is based on SwiftUI. In addition, much of the functionality has been moved onto new foundations as well. This includes SwiftData for configuration management, as well as a shared framework that powers features like the new widgets.
You may also notice that the discovery process is faster, and that I continued to improve support for system-level features, like dark-mode within the app and a dark-mode icon for your homescreen.
Bandwidth icon (light mode)
Bandwidth icon (dark mode)
For users, these technical implementation details should not make much of a difference. They simply provide a great foundation for new features in the future. All those changes mean that Bandwidth now requires iOS 17.0 or later.
Future plans
Version 3.0 has been a long way coming, and I am not out of ideas. I have sketched out plans for versions up to 3.5. Of course, they are not set in stone and I will make adjustments on the go where needed.
So please don’t take the following list as a promise. Remember, that by paying for the pro subscription you will help fund the development as well:
- Native apps for macOS, watchOS, and tvOS
- Improved configuration management
- Live activities
- Control center support
- Improvements to SSL handling
I am excited to hear your feedback,
Sören