There is a lot to consider when making your plan to deploy your mobile devices at scale. This section provides some practical guidance to help you prepare for your device deployment.
Considerations for All Projects
How many devices should you buy?
When planning to purchase devices for a project, it's advised to buy an extra 10% on top of your total user count to compensate for potential losses, breakages, or for use in training and technical support. Historical data suggests a 2-3% rate of loss or theft over three years.
Will you have network coverage?
For selecting a data plan, ensure the network provider offers robust coverage in your project area. Consulting local residents or conducting field tests can help determine the best provider.
Below are some tools that you can use:
How much data should you purchase?
Many projects find that a monthly data allowance of 100 MB is sufficient. To estimate usage, consider that each form submission is roughly 7-10kb. For instance, submitting 20 forms daily over 25 working days requires about 5MB per month. For example, for a project where the FLW submits 20 forms a day, 25 days a month: 20 forms x 25 days a month x 10kb/form = 5MB
How will you charge your devices?
Device charging is crucial, especially in areas with limited electricity. Solutions include home charging for those with electricity, providing solar chargers, or establishing central charging stations, which are cost-effective but have higher theft risks. In some cases, reimbursing charging costs may be necessary.
How will you control how phones are used?
Below are some apps that we have used to support device management
How will you manage your devices
Device management requires a clear contract and protocol to outline phone use and procedures for lost or damaged equipment. For comprehensive guidance, Dimagi's toolkit on device management at scale offers valuable resources.
Considerations For Projects at Scale
For projects that will be operating at scale, this pages provides guidance and key learnings from Dimagi project managers who have supported projects with hundreds of thousands of devices. This section looks back at our key learnings for managing devices at scale, from selection all the way to delivery.
Click below to expand this section for guidance on managing your devices at scale.
Managing Devices at Scale: Click to Expand
Device Selection and Pre-Installation
The first, and most important, step in this process is selecting the correct device for your project. Keeping the user experience in mind is critical to ensure you choose phones that are of sufficient quality and are software compatible for the app you created.
Make sure to specify minimum requirements for the devices that needed to be procured, in accordance with the project’s objectives. To ensure you choose the correct device and mitigate any mistakes that happen during preinstallation, here are a few key learnings from our pre-procurement experience:
Review every feature of the app comprehensively to decide what device specifications are necessary to support your app’s functionalities. From audio format support and processor speed to storage capacity and battery, it is essential to test how the app functions on various devices to hone in on the minimum specifications. You should also consider how the industry landscape is evolving to future-proof the specs as much as possible.
Clearly outline minimum specifications and software compatibility checks for device selection. This will help you articulate and standardize the requirements to ensure all stakeholders are aligned.
Describe in-detail what state the device should be in after pre-installation is done. Be sure to give clear directions on what the device settings should be, and what the app should look like on the device.
Prepare for any eventuality. Specify that the software should be removable and reinstallable from all phones. If all else fails in the field, at least it is possible to start from scratch!
See Mobile Device Selection and Mobile Device Planning for more information.
Sample Testing
If you are working with a vendor and ordering devices, you want to ensure that what you choose is compatible with the app, and that pre-installation is done correctly.
Ask the vendor to submit a sample of re-installed devices. Define testing requirements to ensure that the vendor and you are aligned.
Define accountability for specifications that fall outside of your scope (e.g. life of touchescreen, processor configuration, or other hardware requirements).
You may want to request that the manufacturer provides certification on these specifications, particularly the ones that partners cannot feasibly test for.
Conduct high-load and field sanity tests on the device with the application to ensure the sample device is ready.
See Test your Application Size (Load Testing) for more guidance.
Quality Check
At this stage, the partners should undertake quality check (QC) of each device consignment within a few days of receipt. Once the QC is complete, the partners either accept the consignment or inform the manufacturer of any issues to resolve.
Define and document criteria for the QC exercise based on minimum specs and pre-installation documents, including the need for hardware testing.
Define the sample size to be tested and the thresholds for each consignment passing or failing this exercise
Align responsibilities among stakeholders for any outcome of QC even before the procurement process begins. If you are working with a vendor, they should be responsible for collecting and rectifying any hardware or pre-installation issues identified during QC.
Test devices on-site and build capacity for local or regional teams to be responsible for this exercise.
Device Set-up
Once the devices pass the QC process, it is time to configure them for the field. Each device will require certain user- or device-specific configurations before considered ready.