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IOS 8 High Cellular Data Usage

Upgraded my wife's iPhone 5 32GB to IOS 8 yesterday. About an hour after I upgraded she got an SMS from her provider saying she only had 100MB left of her data package. About a minute later she got another SMS to say it ran out. I reset Cellular Usage Statistics and bought another 250MB data bundle.

About 2 hours later she got another SMS saying she had again used up all data and that out of bundle rates apply, when I checked Data Usage it had used 297MB. She did not use the phone at all during this time.


I have disabled everything under Use Cellular Data For: long ago, except Contacts, Find iPhone, Maps, IMDB, Mail, Settings, Weather and WhatsApp.

None of these Apps had excessive usage under them, some a few KB. System Services had used 404KB.


Personal Hotspot was Off.


Everything in iCloud except for Find My iPhone is off. iCloud is signed in.


Use Cellular Data is off under iTunes & App Store


I have gone through all the Apps at the bottom of Settings and none of them have Cellular Data active.


iTunes Radio under Music is not set to use Cellular.


Is there anywhere else I can check what would be using so much data, have turned Cellular Data off for now?

I am at a loss, I upgraded my iPhone 5 16GB the same way as my wife's and I have not used any extra data, sitting at 247MB since September 1st.

My wife's phone has not changed since before the upgrade, so all settings were the same and it has never used this much data.


Any help would be appreciated.

iPhone 5, iOS 8

Posted on Sep 19, 2014 12:39 AM

Reply
283 replies

Sep 26, 2014 4:47 PM in response to Mitton79

I've been on the phone with Apple for 3 hours today. They refuse to believe that this is their problem even when I showed them my carrier's data logs that show the high data usage started after iOS8. I also showed them screenshots of my phone after I resent the cellular data counter to 0, and 30 minutes later (while on WiFi for the whole time) there was cell data usage.


They had me reinstall my phone from a backup and this is still happening.

Sep 27, 2014 8:05 PM in response to Mitton79

My data plan just rolled over yesterday, and I've used .5 gb already I went into settings > cellular and The App store app used 600+- mb and I go to updates and add up all the updates sizes and guess what.... Even though it looks like the setting " use cellular data for automatic downloads" is turned off in settings > iTunes & AppStor. I was in my home with wifi all day it didn't use wifi to automatically update apps. So I think I just turned off using cellular in the AppStore all together. Hopefully this will get fixed. Btw I am running iOS 8.0.2.

Sep 29, 2014 6:19 AM in response to Mitton79

I was having the same problem. It started on Friday 9/26. I hadn't updated to 8.0.2 yet but I was getting messages from my provided telling me that my data was nearing it's limit. First at 65%, then to 90% within the next hour. I reset my cellular usage statistic and quickly found out that it's the Mail app. It's using ~10MB per minute. No explanation. I'm not sure if it's a bug with the app itself, or a bug with the mail protocol between Google and the iPhone. This entire experience has been extremely frustrating.

Sep 29, 2014 9:42 PM in response to Flutt3r

I am still having this issue on iOS 8.0.2. I contacted Verizon yesterday to get my data overage fee waived and they were being extremely difficult about it.


I had to keep explaining to them that from 9/16 (the day I updates to iOS 8) through 9/28 (the day I contacted Verizon), which is only twelve days, my phone consumed 1.4GB of data. In one month, I average around 1.6GB of data usage. After one hour of help, the customer service representative told me that I would have to just keep cellular data shut off, which is incredibly frustrating. I bought an iPhone to use it, not have my settings shut off. Later the rep told me that deleting apps from my phone would free up some GB of Verizon data; nice try, I'm not dumb. The rep also told me that Verizon has no idea what I'm using my data for, and they have no way of proving that my phone is consuming my data and not a certain app, even though I tried to explain the concept of the Usage screen in settings.


Needless to say, the chat didn't go anywhere. I apologize for the rant.

Oct 1, 2014 5:01 AM in response to Mitton79

Mine still appears to be a problem. I tried to reset all content and settings, have turned off countless other items as well, but it's just used up 7mb within 5 mins. I'm back on wifi now, but on Monday 20% was used up within an hour and a half on wifi! Can't get an appointment at Genius Bar until Monday next week. Just waiting for a online chat with them now.

Oct 1, 2014 11:56 PM in response to Mitton79

I have the same issue here in Germany with my iPhone 6.

Yesterday evening made the reset and configured the phone as new, THAT DIDNT HELP!


Whta I can figure out is, when I start iBooks, it loads dozens of MB over cellular data, without showing up in the system settings.

But the data amount in "iTunes Accounts" blows up.

When I kill iBooks, it stops. Unfortunately I like to read...

Oct 5, 2014 7:51 AM in response to Mitton79

The tip worked a charm for me.

Upgraded my wife's iphone to an iphone6 on 9/26. Made the mistake of restoring from backup in ITunes to get her apps back. After that, in the afternoon of 9/26 it used 140Mb of cellular data, and on 9/27 it used 255Mb instead of her usual 22Mb or so per day. Saw this tip, used "Erase All Content and Settings", set the phone up again using the "set up as a new phone" option, hooked it up to ITunes, selected the apps to restore, and clicked apply to move them to the phone. Data usage for 9/28 through 10/4 is back to 22Mb per day!


Thanks for the tip, so far so good.

Oct 9, 2014 12:38 AM in response to Mitton79

Hi, I've been having a similar problem since getting my iPhone 6 as well.


My usage started exceeding 300MB per day, which is impossible given the amount of data that I use on a normal basis.


I wound up micromanaging my data usage today and realised that the data drain is coming from "System Services" ---> "Documents & Sync".


The data use appeared suddenly in between my scheduled hourly checks, as a lump sum of 277MB.


I called Apple and there is nothing I can do to turn it off. The Apple service staff recommended that I back up the phone, then restore the phone again from that back up.


I'm not really clear from reading the thread - will restoring from a current backup reintroduce the problem to the phone?

IOS 8 High Cellular Data Usage

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