How do you reduce data usage on Android phones?

[Christine Lachance]

Any tips, tricks, or advice much appreciated!

 

[Rukbat]

Turn off background data. Turn off network data. Use wifi.

 

[kramer5150]

turn off cell data whenever connected to wifi, or if the cell signal is so weak its useless (~2/5 bars or less, 3G or 1x).

Monitor your carrier signal strengths around your residence and neighborhood . Areas of weak coverage, I turn off my cell data. This also saves battery power. My city has really weak cell coverage, locals keep voting down cell tower construction measures. opensignal.com has some pretty accurate coverage maps for the places I frequent.

The drawback however at least on Verizon, is I won't get voice mail messages. But thats a very minor negative for me, and its almost a moot point anyways as weak as the cell signals are. I am lucky to get 4-5mbps down... I can forget about uploading. Not sure about your carrier, but Verizon uses cell data allocation from my plan to ping towers and merge in. The spottier the coverage, the more data it uses. Its not much... but it is data that I pay for.

There's a setting where you can force apps to update only over wifi.

log into your carrier and monitor your data usage closely. Verizon has a really good data usage widget, like a pie graph. So at a glance I can see what my device data usage is.

 

[kramer5150]

Go to your data usage screen, toggle it to the "Mobile" setting. Any apps that use data that you don't use, deactivate/uninstall them. I go the extra measure and also restrict data usage for bloatware I can't uninstall. Even an app like youtube that I use a lot, I still restrict cellular data use. One time at my cousins house his wifi dropped without me knowing it. Unknowingly to me my phone had switched to cellular data and I ended up eating ~2.5G of data that evening.

[EDIT] you can see from this screen that Verizon is barely getting 3G from my bedroom nightstand... its even worse in my family room area.

 

[xhenibushka1]

Don't use Instagram and Google by your default browser on ur phone and i think you should be OK