Android OS data drain

[lammy8]

I, like a number of users, have encountered the awful android OS data drain which has taken a crappy 1.6GB of data this month.

There's been a lot of thoughts and theories and whilst I don't claim to know the exact reasoning I'd like to share my solution nonetheless.

If you have background data turned on but have selected any number of apps to be restricted individually, this error occurs. I've no idea why but the android OS starts becoming a data hog when this mix of settings is in place.

So if you're having a data drain caused by android OS then make sure all your apps have background data enabled or you'll end up using more data than you need. It's ridiculous as it completely undermines the point of the feature. I've seen some users claim that apps instead are logged as pushing data through the OS if restricted via background, but it's really unclear if that's true. Either way this will give you a proper reading so at least you know what data is being used by what app rather than the ambiguous android OS.

 

[chanchan05]

Actually, it would be a specific app if that's the case. Apps with blocked internet should report to itself as no internet, hence won't sync. If the app reports to itself that there is internet but connection interrupted, it should also stop and just retry as scheduled. However if an app tries to reconnect over and over, then you see the behavior you mention, and it's all thr dev's fault.

 

[lammy8]

Actually, it would be a specific app if that's the case. Apps with blocked internet should report to itself as no internet, hence won't sync. If the app reports to itself that there is internet but connection interrupted, it should also stop and just retry as scheduled. However if an app tries to reconnect over and over, then you see the behavior you mention, and it's all thr dev's fault.

Ah fair enough. It's a pain to go through every app I have installed to check what's doing it, bit either way just having background data enabled rids the issue for me.