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WizzyWigg
I can't add anything practical to the debate as it's all a bit moot for me not having a smart meter, but it rather annoys me that almost any app which I might possibly find useful only seems to be available for iOS or Android.
I'm an Android phone user but not through choice. Since Vodafone and EE switched off 3G ( and all the smart meters in my area) in 2022, my perfectly adequate fifteen year old Nokia featurephone was rendered useless, so I had to upgrade.
But my ecosystem has always been PC and even my tablet runs Windows. For those of us who prefer using a PC or a Windows based tablet, the lack of availability of apps is a bit of a shame. Even those apps available for PC don't usually work the same way as Android/iOS versions.
Case in point is my Victron app for interrogating my solar inverter. On the phone, it connects to the inverter via Bluetooth, and I can control everything I need to, tweak settings or whatever. I can display data but the only way I can access the data is by using 'Send to' and having to email myself a CSV file which I can then access from the PC and import into my spreadsheet or access via my own custom software. The PC version of the app has all the import and export functionality built in and I can even use OLE or DDE to access the data in real time on the fly. But to connect to the inverter, I need to use a proprietary VE bus to USB interface. So that means running a cable into the house, and connecting it to the PC or tablet via USB. Not a problem on the PC but I need to plug an OTG dongle into the tablet to connect. Yet the tablet has Bluetooth! And if you are 'wired', it kind of makes a mockery of having a 'mobile' tablet.
True interoperability just never gets considered by most app writers, but the problem definitely seems compounded by different OS versions on different platforms.
Another thing that happens with Samsung phones, incidentally, is that it's not just about which version of the app or OS that has an impact on whether an app will work or not, but which particular build of OneUI you have on the phone.
It's all a bit of a mess in my opinion, and with the very 'shaky' and erratic behaviour of the smart metering system as a whole and the non-consistent flow of data from DCC to suppliers or third parties, the whole shebang has so many possible points of failure that I have to ask myself 'is it really all worth it?'. I don't have ANY of these hassles reading my meter manually and I've been running energy tracking spreadsheets for over twenty years with no problems at all.