If you own an iPhone and your device is rammed full of apps there’s an easy way to check which are the worst offenders for eating your precious data.
With all the major networks hiking prices this month, using Apple’s popular iPhone is getting a little more expensive. Monthly contract fees have just gone up by around 7% and if that increase is already hurting your finances now is a good time to make sure you don’t go over your data allowance.
Unless you have an unlimited contract, your network will only give you a set amount of internet access a month when away from Wi-Fi. Depending on the price you pay, this can range from as little as 100MB right up to 100GB or more.
Once you hit the limit, you may find you need to pay more to get your iPhone back online again and prices for extra data are not cheap. EE, for example, charges over £4 for an additional 250MB of data – that’s enough to stream Netflix for around 20 minutes before it runs out again.
If you find you are constantly running out of data each month then Apple has a simple setting that will help you track down which apps are chewing through your usage.
To discover which applications are the worst culprits, simply head to Settings then tap Mobile Services. Here you’ll find a full list of all the apps on your phone and how much mobile data they have used.
To give yourself a good idea of what’s going on each month, scroll to the very bottom of the list and tap Reset Statistics. This clears all the old figures and will show the data being used from the day you reset it.
Pop a one-month reminder in your calendar and then head back to the Mobile Services setting again to find out which services are killing your allowance.
Of course, many apps need data to work properly but you can switch each one off should you begin getting low. Just toggle the on/off switch next to the app and it will no longer access your mobile data.
Here’s what an hour of streaming uses
• One hour of streaming music on Spotify = 150MB
• One hour of streaming Netflix = 700MB medium quality
• One hour of streaming Netflix = 3GB best quality
• One hour of streaming YouTube = 600MB low quality
