topic Re: Mobile app using Gb of data in Android

Mobile app using Gb of data

user-removed — Sun, 07 Aug 2016 06:51:33 GMT

I've recently switched from an iPhone to an Android phone and had some issues over the last few days with my subscription not updating (this is due to Vodafone who took over "paying" for the service for a year). So we gave up on Vodafone fixing their issues and went back to paying for my subscription but this meant all my playlists needed to be redownloaded. We were driving so I turned on download using cellular without thinking twice, this is a feature I've used for years on my iPhone without ever using much data. Before it was even finished I got a notification from my network to say I've used up all my data for the month with ten days to go.

It turns out the app used 6.7 GB of data in just a couple of hours. For maybe five playlists to download again. At most it was 1000 songs but it should be a lot fewer. Now I can't use my data allowance at all for the rest of the month. How could it possibly use that much? My download quality is set to normal, I'd hate to think what high would do. I've never used that much data in a month let alone from a single app which is why I felt comfortable recently switching to a limited data contract with 12 GB a month, more than double my highest historic usage.

Re: Mobile app using Gb of data

user-removed — Sun, 07 Aug 2016 07:12:57 GMT

It seems one playlist which is listed as having 93 songs now I've turned off offline for it had over 2300 songs marked as downloaded. This is one I subscribe to not one of my own but it seems a big jump between what's actually on that playlist and what it had downloaded. If that playlist had downloaded the 93 songs it has on it, the total songs I tried to download yesterday is 273 across 8 playlists. Hardly seems worth nearly 7GB.

Re: Mobile app using Gb of data

TheLastDogMiner — Sun, 07 Aug 2016 08:21:51 GMT

One, what kind of bar and internet reception (4G, 4G LTE, 3G) were you getting, for example, 3G and 1 or 2 bars (Mountains or desert) will make the downloads take longer, forcing it to use more data, also set the offline downloads on your phone to off if you want to avoid this in the future. I'll help as much as I can, even if it isn't much.

Re: Mobile app using Gb of data

user-removed — Sun, 07 Aug 2016 08:31:34 GMT

We were in and out of reception throughout the drive so there's a fair chance it did use extra data because of that but nearly 7GB?
I usually have download over cellular turned off but was turning it on to get my music back on my phone. I've turned it off again now.

Re: Mobile app using Gb of data

ZorkII — Sun, 07 Aug 2016 09:32:16 GMT

Are you using an SD card? See: "Spotify-started-using-ridiculous-amounts-of-background-data"

Re: Mobile app using Gb of data

user-removed — Sun, 07 Aug 2016 23:51:35 GMT

I am now but I wasn't at the time. Spotify actually asked to move the data because it ran out of space on my phone. When transferring the data, the phone indicated it was moving nearly 7GB to the SD card.

Thanks for the link, I can try switching out the SD card but I suspect since the issue arose while using internal memory it may not help.