T-Mobile recently released their first Android application, called My Account, that does something pretty simple: it retrieves and displays your billing information. It is a little more elegant than the T-Mobile web site, for which there is a default bookmark in the Android browser. I installed it, tried it, and didn’t give it much thought seeing the information that I was expecting to see. Now I am wondering how it works because I don’t remember providing any information. This occurred to me because I just tried it again and it is not displaying the right account info. In fact I am pretty sure what I am seeing is not my account. (UPDATE: After updating the application, it now tells me that it doesn’t work on Wi-Fi and doesn’t display any account info.)
I can only speculate, but I am guessing it uses the phone’s network connection info. Right now I am using it on Wi-Fi which appears to not allow the app to retrieve the right info. Clearly this is a bug, but I am also concerned about the functionality to pay the account balance, which could really mess things up if crediting to the wrong account. I just looked at the My Downloads section of Android Market and found that there is an update to this application, and apparently this is a feature and not a bug. T-Mobile is saying that for security reasons the application should not be used on Wi-Fi. This is just lame. The G1 supports Wi-Fi and therefore T-Mobile should have made sure this application works on Wi-Fi. How hard would it be to use SSL and securely access the T-Mobile web site to get the account information? I would be willing to provide my account information, even though the application should be able to retrieve that off the SIM card.
This episode also brings to light another issue: apparently the Android Market application update notification working consistently, because when I checked, four of my applications have updates.
Update: I just realized that My Account is missing an important function: the ability to tell me how much data that I have used. If T-Mobile wants to cap data usage they should provide the tools for userd to know how much that they have used.
