Bandwidth Monitor 3.1.0 is here! After eight months of development, it brings the network debugging tools and contains a lot of changes under the hood. I was initially planning to release this milestone earlier but am happy that the improvements finally make their way into the hands of my users. If you cannot wait to try it out, head over to the App Store to download the update.
Network debugging tool
The most obvious change is the addition of the network debugging tool. You are able to access it via the globe icon in the toolbar. Its a powerful way of seeing what the IP and DNS subsystems resolved under the current network circumstances. If you are having trouble connecting to your router, it might provide you with the required insights so you can find out if the issue is with your device, and save you some time troubleshooting.
A short excerpt of the connection properties that are displayed:
- Endpoint: The remote address that the app is targeting, determined by the active configuration.
- Local: The local IP address used for connecting to the remote address.
- Remote: The remote IP address resolved from the network endpoint, which the app is connected to.
- Gateways: The gateways that are used to connect to the remote address.
- Is constrained: Whether the network connection is set to “low data” by the user.
- Is expensive: Whether the network is deemed “expensive” by the system. Most cellular connections are expensive, for example.
In addition, it will give you insights into the DNS resolution process, handshake times and statistics about URLSession metrics.
The debugging tool does not use the same connection that the actual network requests use, so it might have a slightly different view at times.
Accessibility: Audio graphs
Great news for users of assistive technologies! The graphs now support the iOS audio graphs feature. This allows you to hear the graph, and identify important features and tends in the data.
I am not a regular user of this technology, so I am looking forward to your feedback how I can improve it in the future.
Minor improvements
Under the hood, there are many smaller improvements as well; from improvements to authentication speed for network requests to sync improvements across your iCloud account.
TelemetryDeck is now used as a very privacy-concious analytics provider. It provides me with insights into the app’s performance and environment without imposing on your personal data privacy.
Some colors have been adjusted to match FRITZ!OS 8.0’s new color scheme. I have mostly kept the existing visuals, though, since they provide much better legibility in my opinion. On the topic of FRITZ!OS, the Online Monitor feature has received the ability to optionally track the data usage of individual devices selected by the user. However, this is not exposed on the official APIs. In addition, the existing calls seem to be reporting inaccurate data as of my 8.03 version, seemingly categorizing all upload data into the “background” category. Unfortunately, there is nothing I can do currently to fix this until AVM provides a software update. I hope it doesn’t impact your usage too much, and am hopeful that a future firmware update will resolve this issue.
Try it out and let me know what works well or what could be improvate — I read all your feedback.
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