You can’t carry WiFi everywhere, can you? So what you need is the Mobile Data or we generally call it by the name “Mobile Internet”. With time, the evolution of smartphones, data consumption has increased drastically over the last few years, so it is now limited accordingly by your chosen carrier. Android uses data connection constantly, as many of its services operate over it, this includes Instant Messaging like Hangouts or WhatsApp, Google+, Net browsing, Cloud Storage, Online Backup and much more. Since all these services work simultaneously, you can’t just blow all the data off, which will surely turn up in costing you more on a long run.
Imagine, watching a lineup of funny videos or commercials on YouTube while you’re getting bored sitting in a waiting room- will cost approx 1-1.5 GB of data, uploading a complete album of pictures of your loved ones or your video captures to Facebook- will hike your data to about 600 MBs, even streaming music while doing your daily chores may give a bit of high push to your data consumption. Not just this, there are many other facilities which may ultimately cross your monthly plan.
Hence, there is an essential need to use and conserve data efficiently. So today, we here at DroidViews will help you to save Mobile Data on your Android Smartphone or Tablet following a few simple guidelines and principles. This is gonna save you a lot of data from wasting, preventing you from crossing your monthly data cap and hence saving your bucks.
Read below and I’m sure you will shock yourself, knowing of what tools you already had in your hands and how basic it is to preserve your precious Mobile Data.
Save Mobile Data on Android
1. Choose your Mobile Data Plan wisely
The first and the foremost step here, is to choose your data plan wisely. Calculate and estimate your monthly data use and conclude thereafter. A plan with both excess or lack of mobile data ultimately turns to consume a decent amount of money, which anyone and everyone here will avoid. And hence, we chose the word “wisely”. A plan could either be selected on the basis of the past usage statistics from the carrier service or either by monitoring the data usage using different apps or tools available. Some of the top rated carriers like Sprint, AT&T, Verizon already have online calculators for mobile data. Cost may vary from provider-to-provider and you may choose as you like.
2. Manage your current Mobile Internet using Data Usage
Why need anything else when you have it all by your side already? Google took a leap in Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich and bought a very effective tool to Android’s inbuilt Settings, known as Data Usage. It is far most one of the best data usage calculator and manager available for Android. Using only this very feature you can manage and reduce your data usage to a huge extent. It lets you keep an eye on the complete distribution of data over every particular app, this way you could know if an app is consuming more and should be taken care of. Detailed view of foreground and background data of an app is also available, so as if an app is sucking excessive data in background, it could be restricted by selecting the Restrict background data option. Background data could either be restricted on the whole or specifically for an app.
The first step you would take, is open Data Usage under Settings and view the data consumption chart. Adjust both the white sliders to the either sides, this will extend the calculation period to a complete month, which is what we seek. It will show the total amount of data that acquired during this one month period and also at what times it peeked to a high amount or when it was used steadily. It is recommended to observe the chart daily and look over to the apps that are exaggerating the data and should be controlled. Another helpful feature is to enable Mobile Data Limit, if your provider has a monthly 2 GB allowance on your Mobile Data, you can do set the corresponding limit. Once close to that limit, you shall be warned and thereafter your Android will itself terminate the Mobile Data connection.
It also offers some other short hand features like Data Roaming, Auto-sync data, Show Wi-Fi usage and Mobile Hotspots.
3. Disable Ads
Ads or advertisements are the revenue maker in any field, be it online websites or in-app ads. Most of the Free Apps available for Android offer Ads. Which not only makes the screen look ugly but also expends a lot of data, refreshing and reloading at all times. The most renowned way to do so is by installing Adblock Plus App on your Android. Adblock Plus or ABP is a well known Ad blocking service which is available for most platforms, browsers or smartphones. It completely wrecks any kind of Ad service like pop-ups, video ads, banners etc from your screen and its official and definitely free of any kind of cost.
Below lets take a few steps to Install this app on your Android and configure it.
- Download the ABP App: Click here
- Transfer the downloaded apk to the device storage.
- Go to Settings > Security and check Unknown sources
- Using a file explorer, browse and manually install the transferred apk file.
- Go to the App drawer and tap on the Adblock Plus icon to start the app.
On starting the App, you will be greeted by a pop-up to grant root permissions. Grant it so and the app interface will load. Enable the service by switching ON Filtering. You then have some other options like if you want to view some Acceptable Ads, Hide the notification icon, Change your Filter Subscription (To know more, visit ABP FAQ) and choose whether to start the service at boot.
4. Got a Wi-Fi connection? Use it!
Mobile Internet may not be unlimited, but the Internet connection at your home or office definitely is. Frankly, I try to find a Wi-Fi connection wherever possible. Want to conserve your precious Mobile Data? Make use of Wi-Fi when in a Wi-Fi enabled zone. It is fast and more reliable than the mobile data and always remember, prefer downloading large files only over Wi-Fi.
It is highly advised to update your Apps over Wi-Fi only, updating only a counted number of apps once will cost you approx 200-400 MB. To do the same, go to Play Store > Settings and tap on Auto-update apps and select Auto-update apps over Wi-Fi only. Larger files for example, a movie or a video should never be downloaded using Mobile Data, use your Wi-Fi for it.
5. Switch to a lightweight browser
A heavy browser tends to occupy a large amount of data while opening webpages, it is because it downloads the complete webpage as that on a desktop, each and every time you reload and refresh, which certainly is not a good dose for your Mobile Data. Android has support of some particular browsers which tend to minimize your data usage while browsing.
Opera Mini is one such brilliant web browser for Android, which has been in works since a long time and is well-optimized using proxies. The browser has a pretty basic, yet lightning fast user-interface and works well even on slow data connections. Apart from this, Google also implemented optimized proxy services into its Chrome Beta program, it may be an experimental feature but surely is worth the try.
6. Enable caching of data
Cache is a component in computing that stores temporary data transparently so that data in future could be loaded faster. Caches are relatively smaller in size and are an essential part of browsing. Caching of your browser and apps can reduce the amount of data consumption significantly. It allows your particular app to open webpages at a much better speed, without using much data. On Chrome browser, it is easy to do so, go to Chrome > Settings > Bandwidth management > Reduce data usage and turn ON the button. This will reduce your data usage to an extent by visiting compressed pages.
It is a very intelligent part pre-cache your data, for not just browsers, but also for other apps that use data. From now, if you’re using app that is dependent on data, open the application settings and try searching for an option to download files over Wi-Fi only, enable caching or save it for later. These kind of things will end up in less sucking of your precious data.
So now you know how you can cut-off your data usage with a set of very easy steps to avoid exceeding your monthly data-cap. This is all we had under our sleeves, you can now try these for yourself and use it according to your requirement. If you’ve got another way to add, please suggest, it will be highly appreciable.
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