How To Reduce Data Usage on Smartphones & Save Money on Data

Here is how you can minimize the overall data usage on your Android or IOS smartphone, thus reducing amount you spend on data and the frequency at which you buy data, with the aid of the tips and optimization settings you data subscription will last longer for you, In fact, you will own control over how and when apps should use your data, read on to find out how to reduce data usage on your Android smartphone.

Recently I noticed that the speed at which my data subscription get exhausted is becoming alarming and unusual, without doing much on the internet am spending so much on data every now and then, my android device consumes up to 14GB of data in 14days, this unusual development raised my concerns,

I earlier blame my internet service providers for that, thinking they purposefully wipe my data, but taking a look at my data usage I still found out that my android device has consumed a lot of data, funny enough I never went deep into the data usage analysis to fish out what’s responsible for the data suck, fortunate enough I went deep into my data usage analysis today and found out the culprits and the apps having some good meal on my data without paying for it, I dealt with them and am now in control of my android smartphone’s data Usage, thus spending less on data subscription, I will share this optimization tips with you, so that you can do same as well, continue reading.

Android devices as a smartphone acts its name, “smart” on the quest to serve us simultaneously and consistently it utilizes some system default settings, well most times while trying to discharge its duties promptly our data subscription is used without our permission, thus consuming our data on the background, some apps, on the other hand, contribute to this, though that’s if you fail to optimize them, adhering to the instructions on this post you have nothing to worry about anymore and you can reduce the amount you spend on data.

How To Reduce Data Usage on Android smartphone

1~ Check Apps Data Usage and Set Background Data

To Optimize your android smartphone’s data usage you need to first know what’s having most out your data, obviously, some apps are responsible for that, and to ascertain which app uses more data you have to follow the instructions below.

First navigate to your phone’s settings, under mobile networks, Click on data usage, your overall data usage for a period of time will surface

Now you need to go deep to find out the amount of data each app uses, if the device is dual sim, then you need to click on the sim you accessed the internet with for that period of time.

Now click on Apps Data Usage as shown on the screenshot below.

Details on each apps data usage will show in descending order, with this you are now aware of the apps that eat more out of your data.

Every app consumes data in the foreground(when opened) and in the background(when minimized), it becomes alarming if apps consume more data on the background as done by Bigram on the screenshot below

If you find out that any app is using more data on background, you can restrict it on the data usage settings, by disabling use data in the background option

Now that you have figured out the data usage of each app, the next thing to do is to optimize how they use data.

2~ Disable Automatic data usage on your Chat and Instant messaging apps

Generally, you should disable automatic media downloads on your chat apps, especially Telegram and Whatsapp, with that settings media downloads on groups and channels wouldn’t be automatic, you will choose which media to download in groups or channels

For Telegram, Go to settings, click on data and storage, then Turn off Automatic Download, for both mobile network and wifi as shown on the screenshot below.

For Whatsapp Click on settings, then on “data and storage usage” , under automatic media download, turn it off for all media and connection type, as shown on the screenshot below.

3~Reduce The Video Streaming Quality On YouTube, Mobile TV, and other Streaming Apps

Streaming videos online in HD online can be fun, but your data pays for it on the long run, you should set the YouTube app streaming quality to medium, instead of HD, or Automatic and equally do same for other streaming apps like Dstv Now, Startimes TV and other mobile TV apps you might have on your Android smartphone, the streaming quality settings are easily found on the settings section of the app or on the streaming interface of the app,For YouTube, here is how to set the streaming quality to medium and still enjoy good video quality.

Go to the settings of your YouTube app, Click on Quality and Set it to 360p instead of Automatic as shown in the screenshot below.

4~ Use lite Version of messenger apps

Use this option if you want to minimize how Facebook, Instagram or Messenger use your data, though these features can affect your experience since photos will load in low quality as well as video, you will surely save lots of data using the Facebook lite, Messenger lite, Or Instagram lite.

5~ Set Your Android Wifi HotSpot As Metered Connection on your computer(PC)

Our Android device now serves as the modem for internet access on our PC with the aid of the Wifi hotspot feature, I noticed that most times our PC uses our Wifi hotSpot for automatic software updates and downloads, thus using your data without your knowledge, you can prevent this background data usage by setting your hotspot to a metered on your PC, to do that, go to advance settings on your PCs wifi setting, under your hotspot name and tick the metered connection option , with the aid of that settings you will greatly reduce the amount of data usage on your Android smartphone.

That’s all on how to reduce data usage on android and save you some money.

We hope you found the article helpful, feel free to share any other tips you might have regarding this topic via the comment box below.

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Best regards..