I need an iPhone application that times how much I use each other app

A recent New York Times article about a dispute over whether checking your email on a blackberry should be counted towards overtime pay made me think about the benefits of tracking usage of specific apps on your iPhone or Blackberry.

I wish it would send me a daily or weekly email report showing how much time I spent talking on the phone, checking my email, text messaging and browsing the mobile web. For simplicity it could just break it down by application. Ideally I could drill down on a particular day and see my usage pattern of certain applications over the day. Or maybe it would just give me an iCal feed I could subscribe to that showed my activity.

If they went the iCal feed route, you could then pipe that into your contact management software to log phone calls and text messaging or into your time tracking software for logging hours spent doing email at the pool.

Comments

[gustin]

unfortunately it is not possibly with the official iPhone SDK 2.0, you could easily do it with a jailbroken phone. The SDK is very limiting especially in regards to 'system access' (the phone is considered a system app that you can not touch programatically).

Only one application can run at a time making this idea impossible because it would need to run in the background and monitor other processes. From the iPhone Human Interface Guidelines, "Only one iPhone application can run at a time, and third-party applications never run in the background. This means that when users switch to another application, answer the phone, or check their email, the application they were using quits. (p. 16)"

[Austin iPhone]

Very good idea! I think it is possible with iPhone SDK 2.0.

[gustin]

an application can't monitor another application with the current version of the iPhone Software Development Kit -- apple is protecting the user experience performance, and stability with some Lock Downs :-)