Six Best Ways To Save Mobile Data On Your Smartphone
Mobile data is the data that is offered to you by the telecom company to browse the internet, play online pokies, send emails or watch movies and videos on mobile. However, data inclusions vary considerably between plans and it’s important to get the right amount of data for your usage needs.
The amount of data you need depends on how often you want to use the apps and features on your phone. Some apps or features use a lot of data. These include:
- Streaming TV and video (e.g. YouTube, Netflix and Foxtel)
- Playing online games
- Downloading music, photos, movies and software
- Uploading photos and videos to social media apps (e.g. Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat)
- Music streaming (e.g. Spotify, Apple Music)
- FaceTime and video calling.
When doing all of the above things on a daily basis you need a large data allowance. For merely checking the emails you need a lesser amount of mobile data.
It’s also important to be aware that communication apps, such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Skype, use data to send messages and make voice and video calls. If you regularly communicate using these apps, a larger data allowance might be a better choice.
If you think that you are using much of the mobile data than your needs then you can reduce your mobile data usage limit on your iPhone.
1. Remove Auto play Videos
If you have put the auto play on your youtube or Facebook videos than you need to go the settings and remove the auto mode. So make sure you turn off the autoplay function in the in-app settings. It’s also possible to set apps like YouTube to stream lower quality videos and you might not notice a dramatic difference on screen, but it could save you up to 50 percent data usage per video.
2. Stream music over WIFI
Even if you’ve pre-downloaded playlists from sites like Spotify, or you only listen to them while you’re connected to Wi-Fi, there’s a chance your phone is still streaming them via your mobile network. To be on the safe side, head into your settings where you’ll be able to select the option for specific apps to only work over Wi-Fi.
3. Try reducing the Email frequency
If you are using emails sending and receiving them every hour or minutes you are using a significant amount of data, particularly given that these messages might contain large file attachments. To reduce the impact of email on your data usage, try reducing the download frequency to every hour or even manually. Go to the Mail section within your Settings menu and change your Fetch New Data selection. For those who prefer to keep email downloads up to date, another option is to choose for attachments to only download when you have a Wi-Fi connection.
4. Turn off the Background app refresh
Even when you’re not actively using an app, it will often continue to update in the background – and secretly drain your data. Put a stop to this by turning off the Background App Refresh function on the apps you don’t want working overtime. If you have an iOS phone, head to the General section on the Settings menu. If you’re on Android, use the Data Saver to pick and choose the apps where you want to restrict data consumption.
5. Disable Automatic updates
Your apps are continually being improved by developers, which means regular updates to the software. If these are set to download automatically onto your phone, they can eat up some serious amounts of data, so disable automatic updates on iOS via the iTunes & App Store option on the Settings menu. For Android users, go into Settings within Google Play, where there’ll be an Auto-update option you can alter.
6. Use Wifi
If you use an iOS device, it’s important to be aware of the Wi-Fi Assist feature. Wi-Fi Assist helps you to stay connected to the internet by automatically switching to your mobile network if a poor Wi-Fi connection is detected. While this feature can be useful, you might use more mobile data than you think. This feature is enabled by default upon updating to iOS9 or later, however it can easily be disabled by turning off Wi-Fi Assist in Settings > Mobile.
Download casino or pokies using WIFI
Like as said above don’t use apps or services on your mobile that use up a lot of data, like downloading or streaming video or audio, downloading a casino software or pokie unless you’re connected to a Wi-Fi network. You can often adjust the settings on your phone so that certain apps don’t use cellular data services
Besides these there are many self care tools like the Telstra’s free 24×7 app and your online My Account. Both options give you full visibility of the data you’ve used and what’s still in the bank, so check in regularly to avoid any unexpected billing surprises.
Also many providers send you SMS notifications when you’ve hit 50%, 85% and 100% of your monthly allowance, so you know exactly where you stand and whether you might need to rein in your online activity to avoid additional charges.
Most post and prepaid mobile plans will give you a fixed data inclusion for a monthly fee. For example, for $35 a month you might get 10GB of data (as well as a voice call and SMS allowance). Once you reach 100 percent of your allowance, your provider must also notify you of the charges to proceed with adding extra data to your service. However, be aware that providers have a 48-hour window in which to send the notification and you could still be charged for any excess data usage during this time.
If you don’t want to incur excess data charges, you should consider turning off ‘mobile data’ on your handset when you receive these notifications.
This means that as long as you use 10GB of data or less, you shouldn’t have to pay anything more than $35 a month for data services. However, once you use over 10GB you will be charged extra at a much higher rate for the data you use.
Many plans will automatically add extra data to your service in 1GB blocks for an additional $10. For example, if you exceeded your monthly allowance by 1.5GB, it would cost an extra $20 on top of your monthly plan price of $35.
Some mobile phone providers offer plans that do not attract excess data charges if you exceed the monthly inclusion.
These plans typically limit the download speed available once the headline data inclusion is exceeded.
Talk to your service provider if you have concerns about what happens when you exceed your plan’s data inclusion.
How much mobile data does a regular casino or pokie player need?
If you one of the gamers who is playing online pokies at the casino regularly on your smartphone then you need a larger amount of mobile data.
Experts recommend 30GB a month as the minimum amount for a big-data plan. That’s a good foundational baseline to work with when considering a plan with a solid amount of monthly data, but the reality is there are a lot of plans available today that easily surpass this amount.
For instance, Circles. Life has a popular 100GB Monthly Plan that costs under $40 a month (it’s even cheaper with promo pricing) for 4G-speed data, while the $119 Optus One Plan comes with 500GB of data to use on the Optus 5G network. If you don’t want to worry about data usage at all, check out the limitless data of Felix Mobile, which is capped at a very reasonable 20Mbps to comfortably tackle all manner of mobile online activities on your phone.
Below is a daily updating list of the most popular SIM Only plans with at least 30GB of data.
Even on PCs and next-gen gaming consoles, online gaming doesn’t use up anywhere near as much data as you might expect, even if the core game download and subsequent patches can stretch into lots of gigabytes (update games on WiFi to avoid blitzing through mobile data). Mobile games tend to be better optimized for mobile data usage needs, which means they tend to use less data than their dedicated gaming-platform counterparts. Games may use as little as 20MB per hour or it can stretch up to around 100MB per hour.
