The past year has seen lots of developments in terms of how telcos are curating mobile data plans for their esteemed customers. The three Kenyan mobile operators’ relentless need to appeal to subscribers will be here for a long time, and that is a good thing because competition fuels innovations that benefit customers in the end.
Some of you might remember when people camped on social media platforms to question Safaricom’s mobile data usage patterns. In particular, data plans were depleted in a manner that seemed suspicious for a lot of cases, which may not have been isolated incidences based on the backlash the telco received. Afterward, Safaricom was forced to launch a campaign that informed the masses about how to track data usage in a bid to establish the purpose serviced by the tasty internet-accessing nuggets.
It is worth noting that the campaign is still ongoing albeit quietly as the latest developments seem to address app update issues. See, smart handhelds have grown over time; apps are larger in size and developers update them as often as possible. However, if you, say update your apps on a weekly basis and your data plan is meager, the experience will not be exciting as the activity consumes a lot of data. Also, there are cases where users have Google Play Store/App Store auto-updates turned on, and can’t ascertain that their bundles serviced the updates.
Tucked under the *544# access code (package identifier number 12) is the Unlimited Apps download and updates pass, which we didn’t know existed until it was pointed to us just the other day. The product, which costs KES 20 for a day or KES 100 for a month will, as its name suggests, allow users to download new apps or update existing ones without using an existing bundle.
Of course, the product is a pass, which means it will only work on Google Play Store only, hence cannot be used solely to get access to other internet services.
We are yet to test the service, but at KES 20 for unlimited app downloads in a day, this is obviously a good deal. We will update this post once we learn more in terms of data speeds and so forth.
