iOS5 data usage

I moved my MobileMe account to iCloud yesterday and got a lot of data usage as a bonus. Within a couple of hours my battery was running low and the iPhone 4 was feeling very warm. Tried to disable some settings, but finaly decided to disable mobile networking.

When I got home I found this topic and tried some of the tips, but to no avail. So I tried something different: used WireShark on my Mac to capture all data comming from the iPhone. Switched all features off so data usage was at a minimum. Then I switched on the features one at a time. This led to increased data usage for a small period of time (couple of seconds) but would always return to almost zero.

Except for one iCloud feature that I would have never suspected: Bookmarks syncing!

When I switch it on, data usage starts and doesn't stop for a long time. I've had it run for about a minute before I turned it off again. A few seconds later, data usage went back to almost zero.

Tried this three times with the same result.

iOS 5.1 installed, iPhone no longer using up mobile data in the background.

I upgraded iphone 4s to iOS5.1 on 3/8. Started to notice that battery was draining very fast. Phone untouched, no calls and in stand by mode the battery dropped from 100% to 30% in 3 hours all on a wireless inhome network. Phone is constantly warm to the touch. Then this morning I get notice from AT&T that I've used 65% of my 200meg data plan which reset on 3/7. Obviously something very wrong happened with the new OS version on my 4s. What gets me is that people are seeing different impacts to thier phones. I had to turn off location services and finally cellular data to get it to stop bleeding data. Phone is no longer warm and battery drain stopped but seems a high price to pay to end up with a not so smart phone, at least in my case.

I don't know what the problem with your 4S might be. I installed iOS5.1 in mine and all minor issues I had (using few Kb in the background) seem to have gone away. I have locations on for some of the apps, ie. Apple Store, Maps, MovieTickets, Weather, Yelp.

Here are the rest of my settings:

Notifications, set to manual. In notification center, I left only Phone, Messages, WhatsApp, Calendar, myAT&T, Apple Store, Skype, Bump

Locations Services, set to off

General/About/Diagnostics & Usage, set to Don't Send.

Siri, set to off

Cellular Data is ON, Data Roaming is ON

Bluetooth set to OFF

Date & Time, I just set "Set Automatically" is ON

iCloud, all ON, but Mail and Documents & Data on. But in Docs and Data I set Use Cellular to off. Find my iPhone is ON.

iCloud Backup is OFF

Mail, Contacts, Calendars/Fetch New Data/Push set to OFF. But in addition, I went to the next panel and set to changed each of my three mail accounts: Mail, Contacts, Calendars/Fetch New Data/Advanced/iCloud, Verizon and Gmail all set to Manual

Store, Automatic Downloads is ON, but Use Cellular Data is OFF

In addition, in the Maps app itself (open Maps and tap on the lower right page-flipping-icon) I set the traffic feature to "Hide Traffic".

I do not have a Facebook app

Having exact same issue as you. Something is sending/receiving tons of data, and it's causing the phone to be hot to the touch and draining my battery within a couple of hours.

Frankly, I'm not interested in any of the battery-saving tips people are talking about. My usage pattern has NOT changed since March 7! I just upgraded to iOS 5.1. I had no issues with battery before that, and now the phone is almost unusable. Very upset.

You are right to ignore battery saving tips. First, most of them are myths, and have little or no affect on battery life. Second, you have correctly identified that there is something sending a lot of data, or trying to send it and failing, and retrying forever.

To fix the problem you need to identify the app that is doing it. This has nothing to do with 5.1. It can happen with any version at any time, going back almost 5 years (a quick search of the forum for "battery problem" will prove this statement). It is more common after an update or restore, because the restore process can reload a backup that is corrupt. But it has been reported far away in time from any update. A few of the apps that can cause this include Mail (especially an Exchange account, iCloud, or Google through Exchange), Facebook, App Store, iTunes Store, Ping, Game Center, Twitter, Yahoo and other messaging programs, streaming programs, etc.

If you have an Exchange account delete it, reboot the phone, and add it back. For the others go to the Quick Launch ribbon, hold your finger on one of the apps at the bottom of the screen until "-" appears and tap the "-" to close them all, then reboot.

If none of these fix it go to Settings/Reset - Reset Network Settings (all you will lose is WiFi passwords). Beyond that the diagnosis is harder, but it IS a bad app that is causing the problem and you have to find that app.

Thanks for understanding my plight, Lawrence!

Anyway, problem is now resolved. I did a restore-from-backup, chose the backup that iTunes did when I upgraded, and lo-and-behold, problem is solved, battery is back to normal.

I'm 100% convinced that one of the apps on my phone couldn't handle the 5.1 upgrade and started sending/receiving madly, but somehow, with a restore, it's playing nicely with the new o/s.

OK, I'm back.

In Dec my daughter's phone went over the 2GB limit in first half of month which I didn't believe to be true. I did not have anyway to measure her data usage.

Now, 14 days into the billing cycle she is at 1.5GB according to AT&T.

According to DataMan (Free version), she is at 198 MB on Cellular and about 1000 MB on WiFi.

Has anyone experienced such a discrepancy?

Is DataMan reliable?

okay,

First personaly I have an iPhone 4s on verizon. I have seen this happen on both verizon and att devices.

1. Download att's free billing app that tracks how much data the device is using.

2. turn device onto airplane mode for one day. She will still be able to use her phone but she can't make calls or texts. and it will only connect to wifi. To enable go to settings and swipe to airplane mode on (first setting option with airplane icon)

3. Next day turn off airplane mode and check to see how much data was consumed.

4. If data was consumed then call att because they are having problems.

5. If no data was consumed then you should wipe the device and re-input all data (this will require you to start from scratch with the phone)

6. If wiping it is too jurastic for you then take it to Apple not ATT.

Bump everyone.

My bosses iPhone 4 with 5.1 on AT&T went spinning out of control and gobbled 1GB per day for the last 8 days. I am a power-geek and can affirm that my boss had the out-of-the-box config on his phone, no icloud, no media, no music, no nothing.... yet all of the sudden it is swapping data out of control.

This is definitely a problem in IOS and AT&T. Not users.

-Marc

BTW, I am burning my bosses phone down to scorched earth and laying down a fresh copy of ios5.0 ipsw.... if this works I will let you know.

I took mine into the Apple store for genuis to look at. I had already done a restore and they found nothing wrong with the phone. They did say that sometimes Exchange can go crazy and start sucking data but they had nothing to prove that. That theory didn't hold water since same Exchange account has been used since I had original iphone version and it never went on a data massacre. Also niether AT&T or Apple can tell you what app is eating the data. Only that its being eaten and you get to pay for it. Looks like an opprtunity for a new app that can pinpoint the hungry app or function. Until you can identify what is consuming the data AT&T just assumes you are using the data and you have to pay.

The apps for tracking data are dataman and onavo. Dataman by time and place, onavo by app.

It probably IS Exchange. The ActivSync protocol can get stuck sending data, failing, and sending again. And again. And again.

For all you DataMan Pro users out there, try checking for an update. They recently added a feature for tracking specific apps that use data. It's still not perfect from what I can tell--it doesn't tell you that specific App "X" used so many MB of data...only more "aggregate" information like Apps X, Y and Z used a total of, say, 20MB during some given hour in the day--but it still can provide insights into what apps you might want to monitor more carefully.

I spent some time tracking down huge sent data usage on my boss' iPhone and iPad. I found this article very helpful:

https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#qa/qa1176/_index.html

I used my Macbook Pro running Lion to sniff data packets on the iPad, and determined that the continuous stream of outbound data was to an IP on our corporate network. It turns out that the Mail app (through Exchange/ActiveSync) was trying to deliver a message unsuccessfully, leading to gigabytes of data usage outbound. I found the message in the "Outbox", and after waiting for it to fail to deliver, deleted it, and the data usage stopped. Same story with a different message on the iPhone.

So using the Remote Virtual Interface tool is a strategy that might help you figure out what's going on, if you're upgraded to iOS 5 and have a Mac running Xcode 4.2 or later (freely available to Lion only, I believe).