Best Ways to Save Mobile Data (& Money) on your Phone

Learn How To Save Mobile Data

In the USA, many wireless providers offer inexpensive plans for talk and text. However, Mobile Data is the real killer cost on most phone bills. Below we have listed a few tips to reduce your Mobile Data usage, Save Data, & save yourself a lot of money!

WiFi on Activation – Be sure to Connect to WiFi before activating your new phone for the first time! This will save you from paying for mobile data to update your operating system!
Play Store or iTunes App Store Setup – Connect to WiFi before signing into Google Play or App Store the first time! You don’t want to burn up your mobile data updating all the built-in applications! This “bloatware” comes pre-installed on your phone by the manufacturer, but you don’t need it.
Disable auto-updating apps – Another huge drain on your data allowance comes from the occasional bout of Google Play app updating. If you have the Play Store set to auto-update apps, even over a data connection, this could be chewing its way through your allowance every month without you even knowing. Set to: “Auto-update apps over Wi-Fi only” to save data!
Apps / Games – Connect to WiFi before downloading games or applications! – If you have WiFi available, there is no need to pay for all the extra mobile data.
Video / Music – Use WiFi for watching videos or streaming music. Video and music can burn up VERY HIGH amounts of data. Most internet providers offer WiFi with no limits but if you’re using Mobile Data for your music, you may be disappointed in your high phone bill or early data cutoff! Downloading music or video to your phone over WiFi allows you to view/ listen without paying for additional mobile data! If you can curb your streaming cravings, even just a little, you’ll see a huge reduction in data consumption.
Facebook Autoplay – In the Facebook app, Go to App Settings > Autoplay: Select,
“On Wi-Fi Connections Only”. – This will stop Facebook from automatically streaming videos that you may not be looking to watch unless you’re connected to WiFi.
Restrict Background Data – The easiest way to save data is to tell your apps (or the Android system itself) to restrict background data. Background data is all that internet traffic that goes on when you’re not actually using an app: email syncing, feeds updating, weather widgets and so on.
Don’t upload, download or send pictures or videos over Mobile Data – A single minute of high definition footage captured on a modern smartphone can take up as much as 200 MB of data. Single photos can easily exceed 40 MB. Don’t even think about uploading these to Facebook, or downloading pictures and videos from friends, unless your mobile data plan can handle it.
Compress Chrome pages – Save up to 30% – 35% of your mobile browser data consumption! Just launch Chrome, tap the three dots in the top right-hand corner, go down to Settings and then to Data Saver. Keep an eye on the graph to see your data savings grow.
Navigate Offline – Google Maps can use up quite a bit of your mobile data if you’re not careful, but thankfully it is possible to use Google Maps offline. Simply open Google Maps, tap the hamburger/options button at the top left, and scroll down to Offline Maps. Under that menu, you can “Select Your Own Map” to save offline. Make sure you access WiFi every 30 days or so, otherwise your maps will expire. Another benefit to downloading maps – you can access navigation even if you lose cellular signal in an area with poor coverage!

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