British Gas Iphone App for submitting meter readings
Discussion
Saw it in the news paper last night on the tube and it seems a good idea for submitting accurate meter readings for when the bill comes to pay the correct amount.
However i was reading on the App store reviews that alot of people are having trouble with it. Has anyone used it yet with any success?
Or is it just a gimmick like alot of Apps??
However i was reading on the App store reviews that alot of people are having trouble with it. Has anyone used it yet with any success?
Or is it just a gimmick like alot of Apps??
Why the hell would anyone bother writing an iPhone *application* to do this job FFS?
British Gas are just wasting money, which will pass onto higher costs to the customer.
All you need to submit meter readings is a webpage. And the iPhone does the Internet very well - but more than that, having a webpage to submit your meter readings online means that smartphones *other* than iPhones can also be used.
My provider is EDF (as in Électricité de France) and they have an easy webpage to submit gas and electricity meter readings. No estimated bills, no nonsense, just a reminder to let them know your meter readings, I pop them on the webpage, and I get an accurate bill for my usage the next week. And being EDF, hopefully some of my electricity is coming from their lovely nuclear power stations in France (are the electricity grids linked? I know gas / oil pipelines are cross-border, but not sure whether the French grid is connected to ours so we can buy electricity from them / sell it to them depending on raw material prices... the French have a lot of nukes, we have more fossil fuels, and I prefer nuclear power to fossil fuels... leave the oil and gas for our V8s).
Why bother developing an iPhone app when you can just use the Safari browser to do this? Seems silly to me.
Of course, if British Gas are offering each new customer an iPhone or iPod Touch if you switch energy providers to them... so you can use their app... that'd be a neat incentive, heh
British Gas are just wasting money, which will pass onto higher costs to the customer.
All you need to submit meter readings is a webpage. And the iPhone does the Internet very well - but more than that, having a webpage to submit your meter readings online means that smartphones *other* than iPhones can also be used.
My provider is EDF (as in Électricité de France) and they have an easy webpage to submit gas and electricity meter readings. No estimated bills, no nonsense, just a reminder to let them know your meter readings, I pop them on the webpage, and I get an accurate bill for my usage the next week. And being EDF, hopefully some of my electricity is coming from their lovely nuclear power stations in France (are the electricity grids linked? I know gas / oil pipelines are cross-border, but not sure whether the French grid is connected to ours so we can buy electricity from them / sell it to them depending on raw material prices... the French have a lot of nukes, we have more fossil fuels, and I prefer nuclear power to fossil fuels... leave the oil and gas for our V8s).
Why bother developing an iPhone app when you can just use the Safari browser to do this? Seems silly to me.
Of course, if British Gas are offering each new customer an iPhone or iPod Touch if you switch energy providers to them... so you can use their app... that'd be a neat incentive, heh
cyberface said:
Why the hell would anyone bother writing an iPhone *application* to do this job FFS?
British Gas are just wasting money, which will pass onto higher costs to the customer.
All you need to submit meter readings is a webpage. And the iPhone does the Internet very well - but more than that, having a webpage to submit your meter readings online means that smartphones *other* than iPhones can also be used.
My provider is EDF (as in Électricité de France) and they have an easy webpage to submit gas and electricity meter readings. No estimated bills, no nonsense, just a reminder to let them know your meter readings, I pop them on the webpage, and I get an accurate bill for my usage the next week. And being EDF, hopefully some of my electricity is coming from their lovely nuclear power stations in France (are the electricity grids linked? I know gas / oil pipelines are cross-border, but not sure whether the French grid is connected to ours so we can buy electricity from them / sell it to them depending on raw material prices... the French have a lot of nukes, we have more fossil fuels, and I prefer nuclear power to fossil fuels... leave the oil and gas for our V8s).
Why bother developing an iPhone app when you can just use the Safari browser to do this? Seems silly to me.
Of course, if British Gas are offering each new customer an iPhone or iPod Touch if you switch energy providers to them... so you can use their app... that'd be a neat incentive, heh
But surely you could same the same for the majority of apps? Any app that's basically a front end for a webpage - just use Safari. Any game - just used a PSP/DSi etc.British Gas are just wasting money, which will pass onto higher costs to the customer.
All you need to submit meter readings is a webpage. And the iPhone does the Internet very well - but more than that, having a webpage to submit your meter readings online means that smartphones *other* than iPhones can also be used.
My provider is EDF (as in Électricité de France) and they have an easy webpage to submit gas and electricity meter readings. No estimated bills, no nonsense, just a reminder to let them know your meter readings, I pop them on the webpage, and I get an accurate bill for my usage the next week. And being EDF, hopefully some of my electricity is coming from their lovely nuclear power stations in France (are the electricity grids linked? I know gas / oil pipelines are cross-border, but not sure whether the French grid is connected to ours so we can buy electricity from them / sell it to them depending on raw material prices... the French have a lot of nukes, we have more fossil fuels, and I prefer nuclear power to fossil fuels... leave the oil and gas for our V8s).
Why bother developing an iPhone app when you can just use the Safari browser to do this? Seems silly to me.
Of course, if British Gas are offering each new customer an iPhone or iPod Touch if you switch energy providers to them... so you can use their app... that'd be a neat incentive, heh
The point of creating such an app is ease of use - the iPhone interface is superb and intuitive, so why not create an app to get the best out of it?
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