Saving money by using less data on your android device.

Saving money by using less data on your android device.

Android phones has gotten more sophisticated than ever and it’s seen as one of the best smart phones OS. With its increased apps and features that make use of lots of data it’s quite easy to blow up your data plan’s cap and then incur overage charges on the go.

Gone are the days when service providers gave unlimited data usage, now most data usage is capped at a mere 1GB and even the providers that advertise unlimited data have a soft cap around 3GB and reserve the right to charge you if you break through it. Five years ago, it was almost impossible to completely exhaust 3GB of data on your phone unless you’re a heavy downloader, but now watching ten minutes of YouTube video daily, is enough to add about 1.5GB of data to your monthly usage.  In view of this, would be sharing with you some tips that you can use to reduce the data usage on your android phone.

Checking your data usage.

First of all to be able to conserve and use less data on your android phone, you need to be able to check your data usage and also know how much data you really know.

If you are using an a phone that has an Android 4.0 or above you can check your usage via the OS. Simply navigate to Settingsà Wireles&NetworkàData usage. Here you can see how much data you've used during your current billing cycle, set a mobile data limit that will disable your mobile data connection at a certain point, and view a list of apps that use data and how much they consume. To set a mobile device limit, you just have to adjust the orange warning bar and red cut off bar to your liking. When you reach the amount specified by the cut off limit, the mobile data for your phone will be disabled until you intervene.

Also you could get a data monitoring app to be able to monitor your data usage. They are lots of them in the android market but the one I usually use is Netcounter which updates almost instantaneously. It also allows you to set alerts for daily, weekly, or monthly usage. Set it for a bit under your data cap so you know when to back off before the month is up.

Reducing background data usage.

Apart from the normal video streaming and other user activities that gulped data, there are also these silent background activities such Facebook updates, high-frequency email inbox checks, automatic application updates, and other background activities that can put a real dent in your data usage. One way of reducing this is by curtailing application updates. Updates are very important both for its security purpose and access to new features, but it’s advisable to always do your application updates over a Wi-Fi connection. By default, any apps set to automatically update will do so over both mobile data and Wi-Fi. You can change this by going to the Google Play Store app, pressing the menu button, and then selecting Settings àUpdate over Wi-Fi only. Toggling this setting on will save you untold amounts of mobile data usage over the life of the phone.

Using a mobile friendly browser

Android comes with its own pre stock Web browser, but that doesn't mean you're stucked to always use it. You can decide to switch your browser to something more data friendly like Opera Mini (Opera Mini is a free and speedy little mobile browser that compresses websites before sending them to your Android device in order to reduce your data usage. It compresses websites and images so that you can load them faster and use less bandwidth.) Opera Mini claims to compress sites by up to 90%, which can mean huge savings. Or better still use a text only web browser like TextOnly. (TextOnly is free to download and will display only the readable text on most of your favorite websites, though if you happen to come across an article that really requires pictures and/or video you can always select the "View the original" option to see the full article in all its glory.)

Always use a mobile view

Most Web sites have full and mobile versions. The differences between the two are their layouts and amount of content. Generally, the mobile version has far fewer page elements to load and is optimized for viewing on a smaller screen. This translates into less data usage for you. Web sites will normally detect if you're on a mobile device and display the content accordingly, but just make sure you haven't slipped into full mode accidentally. You can tell you are in mobile mode by finding "m" or the word "mobile" in the URL, or by scrolling to the bottom of the page to see if there's a link for the "Full site".

Reducing clearing the cache.

If you don't clear your cache often, you'll end up using less data because your browser won't have to constantly re-download images and other Website assets. If you like to visit the same Website often, obsessively clearing your cache forces your device to redownload the same basic information each time you visit the site. It's a waste of data, and if you use a task-killer app you might be wasting that data without knowing it. Although a lot of task managers and cleaning utilities for your phone love to delete the browser cache. This is not always a good thing, unless the cache is so great in size its always advisable not to clear it.

Use only Wi-Fi to stream

Streaming music and movies is a huge data drain. Watching YouTube videos for just 10 minutes per day can easily push you past 1GB in a month, while listening to Pandora for 1 hour per day uses about 1.76GB of data in a month.

The obvious solution is to stop streaming media over your mobile data connection. The best way to stream videos or music is over a Wi-Fi connection where your mobile data is not being used up.

If you feel they are other ways of conserving data on an android phone which has not been mentioned above feel free to drop your comments below so that we all can learn from you.