The one problem we all face as cell phone users (especially in the United States) is that tracking free minutes (called anytime or whenever minutes depending on your carrier) is a pain. By pain I mean we actually have to make a conscious effort to dial a number to find out how many minutes are remaining. Most of us, of course never do this because it is just too much work. We might do it once a week, that’s if we remember what that number is, which is usually buried deep inside the support pages of your carrier’s website. Since we personally have this problem we decided to build an app to track our free minutes for our shiny new G1 android device.

Now this is not an easy problem to tackle, we had several hurdles along the way. Most carriers do not provide developers with an API to access this kind of information (although that would be great). The reasons could vary but my guess is that they prefer their customers to incur overages because that’s where they make their money. Also we did not want our app to be dependent on internet connectivity so we built an app that completely resides on your device without needing any external help. The result is Minutes Tracker, an app that not only tracks free minutes but it looks good doing so. We built an interface that is not only fun to look at but easy to read at a glance. Although, if you don’t have the time and patience to open up Minutes Tracker, you don’t have to, because not only will it flash a notification after every call but it will also notify you when you are running low minutes.

We don’t make any claims for accuracy of the information but we feel some information is better than none. We are already working on the next version of Minutes Tracker that will make the information not only accurate but reliable. So go ahead install it and if you like it then don’t forget to give us a good review.