A few days ago, one of our readers reached out to me on Twitter asking for a link to Datally since they couldn’t find it on the Google Play Store. Not suspecting anything, I dutifully checked the Play Store and pasted them a link.
A few days later, reports are surfacing that the Google data-saving application is actually not available on the Play Store.
Checking the Play Store while not signed in confirmed my worst fears:
This means that the application has indeed been unavailable on the store for a few days now – maybe longer, who knows?
You see, even if Google has pulled the application, those who had installed it previously should still be able to access it in their app libraries on the store. This is just how the Play Store works. Google only permanently purges app for both existing and new users when they have gone way beyond the red line. As was the case recently with CamScanner. There are lots of apps that have long been discontinued and pulled from the store that I still have access to. Like Flappy Bird, remember it?
In just over a month, Datally would’ve marked its second anniversary.
Datally’s last major feature update was over a year ago when it got several new features. The app hadn’t been updated to support Android 10 by the time it was pulled.
At the moment, there is no explanation from Google about what’s happening to Datally but in the event it doesn’t come back we may not be so surprised. Google has doubled down on data-saving, making it a core part of its upcoming Go edition of Android 10. Already, applications tailored for devices running Android Go are heavily optimized not only to go slow on system resources but also to conserve data.
What about users of other devices?
That is a tough question to answer at the moment given that we are on the record highly recommending Datally to anyone who cared to hear. While that remains so, users can use some of the available data monitoring features of existing applications as well as the Android system itself to avoid going overboard as far as their data usage goes.
