How To Reduce Mobile Data Usage On Your Android & Iphone

I remember in those days when i used to use 10 megabyte of data for like 5 days only for whatsapp chatting. Nowadays even 10Gb is not enough for me(Note, not because i am wasteful with data, but because i do a lot of download online) In this article, I will walk us through some practices we may need to cut down on or avoid altogether if we want to get real value for every dime spent on mobile data subscription. I have more complaints from android phone users compared to their ios  and windows counterparts. Now let us begin:

HOW TO DRASTICALLY REDUCE MOBILE DATA CONSUMPTION ON ANY ANDROID PHONE

Change your email notifications from push to manual or time based: Well, some guys out there resceives up t 70 unsolicited emails daily. If your email notification is set to push, it simply means anytime a mail ariives, it is pushed directly to your phone and your email client works round the clock to search for new emails. Goto to your email settings and change this to manual. you can get this within the email app on any android. As for iphone, goto settings>Mail, Contacts, Calenders>>Then click on fetch new data and set Push to off.

Please off GPS / Location service when not in use: This is very true in Most african countries where gps services as well as internet connection is very poor. I urge you to turn this off whenever you are not using them. If you want to use your map or any app that requires location, grant such app the required acess to your gps / location service and switch it off immediate after use. Note: location service is ver useful for “find my iphone” and other server-dependent anti-theft like samsungs’ “find my mobile”services. To turn your location services off on Apple ios goto>> sett9ings>>privacy>>Location service. As for android goto settings>>privacy and safety>>location then off.

Manage your notifications of social media apps like facebook, googgle hangouts, twitter: I cant give you a specific guide on what do to here but just remember, the more notifications that comes to your phone, the more data and battery you are consuming. just minimize the frequency. as for me, i only permitted events notification on Facebook as well as alerts by friends. i disabled every other thing as i simply do those manually.

Limit background data: As said earlier, you need to restricts data consumption by some applications in the background. Applications like google play store(tries to auto update by default you need to switch this off from its settings), facebook, your mail apps / clients, and host of others. You can do this in two ways, either you restricts background application from within settings or android or you disable sync under accounts on androids. The easiest way to save data is to tell your apps (or the Android system itself) to restrict background data. Background data is all that internet traffic that goes on when you’re not actually using an app: email syncing, feeds updating, weather widgets and so on. This can save you a lot of data, not to mention battery life. You’ll generally need to do it via the Settings menu of the app in question
in iOS, you can also go to Settings > Cellular and scroll down to see a list of apps under Use cellular data for. Toggle off anything that isn’t essential.
In Android, take a look under Settings > Wireless & Networks > Data usage and tap on an app to find the option to Restrict app background data.

Disable Auto-Updating of Apps: Another huge drain of your data allowance comes from the occasional bout of Google Play app updating. If you have the Play Store set to auto-update apps, even over a data connection, this could be chewing its way through your allowance every month without you even knowing. To check, go to the Play Store and swipe out the left-hand navigation drawer. Tap Settings and at the top, you’ll see Auto-Update Apps. Tap this and make sure you  have it set to ‘Do not auto-update apps’ . To manage individual apps, go to My Apps, select an app and then tap the overflow menu to check, or un-check Auto-Update.

Put Your media files especially Music and Videos on your Phone’s memory or external storage: If you are in the habit of streaming your music and video before downloading them, you are losing on two fronts. why not download them once and for all, or you can get them sent to your from friends who already have them, then watch or listen at your leisure.Streaming services like YouTube, Spotify,  and music sites are huge data killers. If there’s a tune or album you’re constantly listening to at your leisure  or on the way to work, you’ll use much less data by loading it onto your phone and listening to it offline, than endlessly streaming it from the web.

Change your browser: 2 browsers are equuiped with data saving features by default. these browesrs are Opera mini and Ucweb. Also if you use Chrome for all your web traffic, this tip alone can save you 30-35 percent of your mobile browser data consumption. The Data Saver option compresses web pages before loading them in your browser.

Using Data Saver does slow things down a tiny bit, but you quickly get used to it and a moment’s delay is worth it when your data lasts so much longer. Just launch Chrome, tap the three dots in the top right-hand corner, go down to Settings and then to Data Saver. Keep an eye on the graph to see your data savings grow.  Similarly, The Opera for Android / iOs browser now has a very useful video compression option, which can save you a load of data if you’re frequently watching videos on the go. To use it, simply download the Opera browser, go to Settings > Data savings and tick the box that says Video compression.  This setting not only saves you data, but also means that videos are more likely to load faster.  Apart from the above, you should only browse mobile versions of websites where possible, as they tend to load faster and use less data. You should also avoid deleting your Internet cache (which is a common way to free up some space on your phone). By preserving your cache you won’t have to download images from frequently visited websites every time you visit them.

Ditch the Facebook Major  for Facebook Lite App or A less Demanding one:   Apart from managing your facebook notifications, you cn even do better. Android users are well aware  that the Facebook app is one of the biggest consumers of data, not to mention its high resource use and battery drain. So why not replace it with something less demanding?

There are lots of alternate Facebook apps but many of those are just as hungry as the official version. Even Facebook Lite, which claims to reduce data consumption by 50 percent, still chews through hundreds of MB in a month.