Android devices are considered heaven-sent in this technological era. They make life intuitive and fun. One of the major undoings of android devices is their data consumption. If you are running on a prepaid system, you know how painful it feels to buy a bundle only for it to be consumed before any meaningful usage. The good news is there are solutions that could significantly reduce data consumption on an Android device.
Read also: How to change Whatsapp Bubble color on android phone
- Awareness
This is the first step in reducing data consumption on an Android device. You need to know which applications are using the most data. You will be surprised to find out that the application that uses the highest amount of data is the one you rarely use.
Data can be consumed in two ways; in the foreground and in the background. Foreground data consumption is like browsing the internet or downloading apps. Background data consumption on the other hand is what happens behind the curtains. You might have set automatic updates unknowingly.
The first thing is to turn off automatic updates. Background data (accounts and sync) should also be off unless it is necessary. The next thing you will need to do is to download an app to monitor data usage. An example of such an app is My Data manager. It has various ways of tracking data consumption. The app gives you the option of allotting the amount of data that you want to consume in a day. You can kill apps that are consuming data unnecessarily. You can download the app Data Manager
- DroidWall app
This app can only be put to good use after knowing what consumes data on your Android device. It dictates which applications are to access the data network. This is the perfect app if you are on a prepaid system and also looking to improve your battery life.
The app prompts are self-explanatory. You can switch between black and white list modes and mark the applications that you would like to block.
Get app here
Note: Rooting is required for this app to work effectively.
- Advance Task killer
This app enables you to kill applications that are running in the background. I find this application interesting because there will always be apps popping up even after you have killed them. This means that the data-hungry app activating periodically.
You can download the app here
Bottom line
It is important to know your data consumption. This will make it easy to probe for ways of reducing consumption. You should only download apps that are important. Your data should be disabled whenever you are not using the internet.
The above-mentioned methods have seen me through with as little as 10MB a day on my Sony Experia ray. Use them and you are assured of reducing your data consumption by almost 30%. Data should be the least of your worries on your Android device.