Have you developed large applications with/without anonymous usage data?
You need a good volume of data and you aren’t going to want to pay for it for one simple reason: you can get it for free and only a tiny group of users are going to be upset enough by this.
Not sure what the reference to “ideal OS” is about. I thought this was about windows in particular.
Necessary network calls would be related to updates, licensing etc. But the thing is: they would be going “home” to the exact same servers as telemetry AND they would easily contain the same payload.
No, sorry. Testing answers “does the feature work?”. Usage telemetry answers questions like “was the feature a good idea?” and “are enough users successfully using the feature to justify the cost of creating/maintaining it?”.
Those are not questions for which pre-release testing can provide answers.
I’m not weighing in on opt-in vs opt-out, or on anonymization. Just saying that testing doesn’t cover this niche.
(Separately, I think you’re largely wrong about testing as well: crash dump collection is about finding issues that pre-release testing wouldn’t find at any price. For things like OSes especially, the permutation space of hardware * software * user behavior is too large. While I’m sure a few companies use crash reporting as a crutch to support anemic QA programs, I do not think that many do.)
That people ask for it doesn’t make it a good idea. Even if it’s a good idea and people asked for it that doesn’t mean people used it because they might not know about it. Is the feature prominent or intuitive enough? Should it be described in some newsletter or documentation?
You will never know without actually asking enough users (which is a large sample). And there is a simple way of ”asking” this.
You need a good volume of data and you aren’t going to want to pay for it for one simple reason: you can get it for free and only a tiny group of users are going to be upset enough by this.
Not sure what the reference to “ideal OS” is about. I thought this was about windows in particular.
Necessary network calls would be related to updates, licensing etc. But the thing is: they would be going “home” to the exact same servers as telemetry AND they would easily contain the same payload.