If you’re stuck with a bad wireless carrier, trust us: you are not alone. Carrier networks are patchy, and it’s often hard to figure out which service is best in your area. Glove for Android attempts to remedy your maladies by telling you which of the four major wireless carriers has the best service in your area.
Here’s how it works: You download the Glove app and it monitors your usage patterns for three days. After the three days are up, it compares your network coverage and service quality with “hundreds of millions” of other mobile phone users and tells you which carrier it thinks is best for you. And if you want to switch, that’s easy, too. Glove gives you the number for that carrier, so you can sign up or ask about its plans.
There is a catch, though. For now, Glove only supports the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City. We would like to think that, as time passes, more cities will get support, there is no word when we might see the app supported in other U.S. cities, or even other countries outside of the U.S.
According to Crowdx, the company behind the app, an iOS version will be available later this year.
Currently, Glove (free) works on all four major U.S. carriers: Sprint, Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile. We aren’t sure when support will make its way to regional carriers, such as U.S. Cellular and Cricket.
While RootMetric offers a similar solution that uses a map, Glove keeps things relatively clean. We’ll update this post with our hands-on impressions in a few days.
