Why is ‘General” under ’System Services’ using excessive cellular data?

If all your data is syncd to iCloud its a straightforward job to restore the phone to factory and set it up from scratch.

Whatever carp is on there will be in the backup, but Backup first just in case.

LD150 wrote:

guildfordnz wrote:

My cell phone plan has just renewed, ....

if I restart my phone while out of wifi coverage, the 1Gb of data disappears rapidly (within minutes) and the culprit is System Services/General.

Or the culprit is your provider, indicated and measured by Systems Serviced, General

I strongly recommend anyone with this problem to get a hold of a monthly rolling cellular plan and test it for a week. Divert your calls to the new number then take off the current plan fir the test.

I really do think I have fixed the issue now. I still don’t know what was causing the problem.

My fix was rather drastic - I erased my phone and did not restore from a backup. I took screenshots of the apps etc and only reinstalled those that I absolutely “had” to have. It’s surprising how few of the apps that I used to have on my phone I actually need!

Everything seems to be working just fine at the moment.

EDIT: Never mind, I see your screenshots. On my iPhone, your screenshots in original post were not displaying properly.

When you tap the arrow facing right, what System Services are listed?

BTW speed test apps and adblockers have been known to install VPN without your consent.

Only install apps you really need when you rebuild.

I spent about an hour with Apple support. They had no clue. They suggested to turn off Apple Intelligence (could be useful) and to turn off cellular data completely (it would work but then the iPhone would stop being a smartphone). So, so far no solution. I find it shocking that Apple seems or pretends to be unaware of the problem.

My cell phone plan has just renewed, so now I have more data to experiment with to see if I can find a cause for the data drain that I have.

All I have come up with so far is that if I restart my phone while out of wifi coverage, the 1Gb of data disappears rapidly (within minutes) and the culprit is System Services/General.

If I don’t restart my phone while out of wifi coverage, then everything seems to be fine and my data doesn’t disappear.

I have been dealing with this for over a year. I had just resigned to keeping cell data off. In some occasions where I need to turn data on, my phone just likes to consume 200-300mb in general for no reason. It usually happens within an hour.

i use DataMan so I can tell where it happens. I just have no idea what causes the issue. Had looked for a vpn that would log ip addresses and data amounts to see if I could find out what site is being contacted for the transfer. But could not find a suitable one. I’m not even sure it would log this anyway.

I have a new 16e since earlier this year and it is not any better over my se3. Am thinking I will erase and start fresh.

i called Apple once early on. The tech on the phone said that they (Apple tech support) have no idea what general means! They said the developers do not tell them. I found this infuriating. At least tell me what it is you are doing that’s so important you can’t wait for a WiFi connection!

My shared data plan is via xfinity so each extra gig costs $20. I suspect this bug has cost me at least $300.

I would love to have Apple tell us what consumes this data.

This absurd issue forced me to switch all our 3 Xfinity lines to Unlimited, even though only my 15 Pro Max was the culprit with huge System/General data use (more than 5GB/month). My teenage daughter has the regular 15 and did not experience these huge spikes in cell data (and she uses her phone much more than me).

Now I am testing the following: I offloaded (not deleted) almost all apps I had (about a hundred) and kept only those that are absolutely essential for me. We will see how it works out for me. I will report back later.

Less than a week later after the visit to the Apple Store and yet another 1.2GB chewed up by System Services/General (thought the latest iteration of settings twiddling had sorted it earlier in the week. However, yesterday when out and about in the city, regularly checking usage the high consumption by System Services appears ti start after taking a series of photos using the stock camera app (even though the camera app itself claims to have used a few 10’s of kB).

So another trip to the Apple Store to some poor bewildered soul to try and figure out what next (hardware tests claim OK) and another comparison of configuration to my partner’s phone (identical model, broadly similar software installed, purchased 3 months later, doesn’t see the issue). Now upgraded the phone contract to unlimited data so as to not unexpectedly run out of data when away from home/wifi. Does seem to be an Apple issue.

OK, so near the end of last month, I was on a flight overseas, and took the opportunity to remove and/or unload most apps that I never use.

I thought possibly this would have fixed the problem. But nope. Just Sunday, I was driving somewhere, and all of a sudden I get the alert that my data got used up (I have the Dataman app to track these usages and where they happen).

Within seconds, 300MB used in General, for nothing.

So now, I'm hobbled again with data turned off until I can figure this out.

I will note one thing: it *seems* like the data usage happens when near intermittent wifi. You might think, "hey that's the wifi assist!". Nope, I have that off. Had it off since the beginning. But there is something about being around wifi that triggers it. A lot of times, it happens right near my house (Dataman tells me the locations). My theory is that some app requests a transfer while in wifi, the OS lets it through, but then the wifi cuts out. Rather than kill the transfer, it just jumps on to cellular and finishes the transfer. I wish it would tell me which app is doing this (the most frustrating part), but it doesn't.

Wifi assist off. Automatic downloads off. App store cell data off. icloud drive off. icloud backup off. In low data mode. Trust me, I have turned everything off. This just keeps happening. And only on my device. My wife can leave her phone on cell data all month, and we end up the same amount with my one burst of data in seconds taking up half of what she normally uses.

I am about to the point that I want to reset the phone and not restore from backup to see if whatever it is that causes this gets cleared. I might try this for a month and see what happens.

I was notified by Spectrum today that I also over used my allocated data and the System Services General Data was the guilty party, it used about 1.23 Gb. This is the very first time it ever happened. I am puzzled. It cost me 5 bucks.

I’m having the same problem. I have an iPhone 15 Pro Max using iOS 18.5.

I have a plan with limited data and normally this isn’t an issue - I am rarely out of Wifi coverage. The last 4 times I have been out of Wifi coverage, my phone has eaten all of my data - each time I have topped it up again and tried various fixes.

I am using Low data mode, data is off for all apps, I have turned off location services for everything except “Find my”, “Emergency calls and SOS” and “Setting time zone”; the only apps having access to location services are switched to “While using” and were not being used at the time of data drain.

I took a screen shot of my data usage at 4:35pm (21.4Mb) and another at 10:29pm (1.03Gb) and my phone had been turned off for about 2 of those hours. When I look at the data usage, it is mainly System services/General (1.02Gb)

You can see from the screenshots of messages from my cell phone provider that the data is disappearing rapidly - 204Mb in 1 minute on 6 May and 414Mb in 7 minutes on 20 May. I know that this usage on 20 May was after I had restarted my phone (it was turned off for about 2 hours while we were out).

Other than turning cellular data off altogether, how do I fix this???

[Edited by Moderator]