IOS 8 High Cellular Data Usage

I Have had the same problem when bill cycled last month. I did everything that was suggested but I alaso had AT&T issue a new Sim Card on 5S and had my account reprevisioned and I haven't had the problem since. I have since upgraded to the iPhone 6 Plus and (knock on wood) everything has been fine! once that new Sim Crd was issued at the AT&T Store and it reprevisioned my account it has been fine. I had the same problem in July as well. Never knew what was causing my data to send like that and since I upgraded to the 6 Plus I have lucky not and ANY kind of problems SO FAR! LOL!!!! .

HOpe this little tidbit timid it on top of the other fixes will help someone out!!

I'm having this problem with EE (formerly Orange) in the UK.

It came to a head two weeks ago. I'm on a 4gb cap and two days after my data refreshed my mobile data stopped working. i rang them and they told me I'd run out of data. i told them that this was impossible; that just two days previously my data had refreshed and - based on my last refresh of their data meter on my phone - I had only used a few megabytes, but they were adamant that my phone had chewed through almost four gigabytes of mobile data in a matter of hours on a saturday morning. "you'd be surprised how easy it is to do this on 4G" was their only response.

This has only been happening for two months In June I went to Scotland and stayed in a friends log cabin with no wifi. I only had 4G and 3G. I was tethering my laptop, downloading images and uploading photoshop files, watching you tube videos and streaming internet radio and didn't get anywhere near my data limit; then in September huge chunks of data started going missing without any explanation.

Following the last debacle, EE kindly topped up my data until I could get to the bottom of it. i downloaded an app called DataMonitor from the App store. This independently monitors your data consumption and can separate cellular and wifi data, rendering the results separately.

For the first few days my data consumption was ridiculously low. Then I went to the movies one night. My data monitor showed that I had used just under 1.5gb of data at this point. I had my hotspot switched off and didn't use my phone until the following morning except to look up the cast of the movie on IMDB.

The following day when I checked the data monitor it reported that my phone had gone through over 2GB of cellular data! Overnight. While I was on WiFi for most of that time...

The app also shows you the location where the data was used (mast locations etc.) Two locations near my home had delivered a few kb of data. One had deliver 0.9mb. another had delivered around 235 kb. There is no way the cellular data consumed at these locations could possibly add up to 2GB.

I really don't know what is going on. The rep from EE advised me to reset my phone and upgrade to iOS8, but the problem seems to have got worse.

I also use my phone for tethering, as it's primarily a business tool. Apple Mail just used nearly 350mb in a couple of hours churning through various synchronisation and caching operations.

I've now turned off background app refresh, mobile data for all but essential services, iCloud drive and my phone's data use has dropped to microscopic levels without actually affecting day to day functions, but I'm still left with the problem of tethering. i used to be able to tether with just 1.5GB of data but if Mail keeps chomping through data at this rate it's not going to be practical to use it...

Anyone got any ideas as to how to stop that? Although I regularly delete spam and unwanted messages, my email account is a very busy one and gmail server synchronisation still seems to use massive quantities of data.

Update: October to November consumed (unlikely) 18.4 gig! Bill from AT&T was $310.00. No deal. After 45-50 minutes on the phone (a real phone, not a toy phone) I got nowhere. Went to an Apple Store in Louisiana, large major store, not a reseller or booth in the mall. Had to wait 90 minutes for service. Eventually got to explain the dilemma. Courteous store tech support empathized, offered to "check the phone" in the back room. Learned during our nearly 50 minute session that the phone CANNOT show which "app" is using the data. General > Settings > Usage on I6 only gives battery usage per app, not data transfer. Nowhere else on the phone did either, according to the store. After a lot of hemming and hawing they actually offered to exchange the phone, no charge, with a new-in-the-box I6. The even assisted with transferring files stored on the old phone to the new phone. That was surprising, but, after hours with AT&T and at Apple, no solution. No leads, no advice from the service provider or Apple. Just "oh well." Any updates out there for killing this ripoff?

I also suspected that there was some kind of shady business going on; not with Apple but with my carrier, EE, because my data requirements are low and the excessive data usage always seemed to happen towards the end of the month when I had huge amounts of data to spare; then, out of the blue, about 80% of my remaining data would vanish into thin air and the offer to sell me more data would come in.

This has only started happening since August. Up until then I was using my phone exactly as I am now, tethering without a problem and average a little under 3GB per month.

The app I installed however shows that the data is passing through my phone and doing so in massive, unpredictable bursts, even when I'm on wifi apparently.

Personally, I don't think Apple care enough about anything outside of Apple to be in any kind of conspiracy with carriers. I think simply design their operating systems and their applications to take full advantage of the fastest and most advanced hardware and connectivity available and don't consider the lowest common denominator - i.e. those of us who are on limited bandwidth, older hardware etc. These days almost every device has some built in internet dependence to the point where some elements of an operating system won't even work properly without an internet connection.

In this case I suspect that the problem has been caused by an update to iOS which turned on background app refresh for all apps. Turning this off hasn't affected my phone at all, but the phone's data used has dropped dramatically, the only problem now is the Mail app while tethering.

AyeAye,

Settings/Cellular is cellular data usage, by application that used it. If an app doesn't show up there, then it didn't use any cellular data since the last time the list was cleared using the "Reset Statistics" button. Some of the apps that use data, however, are somewhat cryptic as to what is actually going on with the data use, and these are under Settings/Cellular/"System Services. These are the apple applications that are built into the os of the phone, and I don't know of any definitive list describing just what they all are. Some are pretty obvious, like "gamecenter", where as others are perplexing, like "Documents and Sync". As far as I have seen, btw, the big culprit is "Documents and Sync" which, I think, is used a LOT if one has the phone set up to back itself up to a cloud drive automatically using cellular data. But I think it includes the "Notes" app too, which of course has "documents".

Not quite; you have to scroll down to system services to get a breakdown of data usage, but it doesn't do it by app. the figure next to the app represents the amount of data stored (or otherwise cached) on the device. On my phone, personal hotspot is the highest user, with 46GB.

Eltham,

System Services shows the data moved by the OS that is not included in the individual application figures. The individual application figures involve data movement, not data storage.

If you want to see the data storage by application, go to Settings / General / Usage / Manage Storage.

Think about it this way: A person is using the "Notes" application, is not on wifi, has it set up to use the cloud, and adds a new note. Data storage and cell data usage go up. The person taps "resets statistics" on the cellular data page. Data storage stays the same, but cell data usage zeroes out. They then add another note. Data storage goes up, but cell data usage shows only the amount just transmitted up to the cloud, because it just shows data moved, not stored..

I got a warning about burning through all of my 2 GB of data from AT&T on my iPhone 6 with iOS 8.1.1. I really use very little data normally, so this was very odd.

I eventually got it narrowed down that merely logging into iCloud, with all items disabled, tested with two different iPhones 6’s, cause each to consume about 1MB a minute of cellular data if WiFi was turned off. All of this data was used by Settings->Cellular->System Services->Documents & Sync. Didn't matter how long it had been on WiFi beforehand, disable WiFi and cellular usage would start up at 1MB a minute or so.

Seven or eight long chats with Apple later and more than a full work day worth of time spent over a 24 hour period. BTW, One of them told me to just turn off LTE. Said if I didn’t then that was my choice and it was my problem, that this would help battery life, which was never an issue anyway. I asked to speak with someone else.

Restores, rebuild as new, reset and erase all data; nothing would stop the data burn, short of logging out of iCloud.

Eventually, I checked all devices that are connected to my iCloud account, I have several, and turned off as many iCloud services on each device that I could.

The one I suspect most. I logged-off of iCloud from an old Mac Pro, which is running Mavericks and cannot be upgraded (officially) to Yosemite. My best theory is that this computer with Mavericks was somehow writing data and confusing my iCloud account and causing my iPhone 6 to keep reattempting, and repeatedly failing, to sync some documents or data. Only a guess.

Since the last restore of this iPhone, data usage is down at 18.2 MB total with “Documents & Sync” using only 488 KB so far.

For comparison, it used “Documents & Sync” 25 MB during testing during the chat with Apple on Wednesday by turning off WiFi only a few times. It used about 500 MB in the previous 24 hours. Apparently for nothing.

This behavior, so far, has stopped after consuming 1.2 GB of my data plan in just a few days.

This cost hours and hours of my time plus loads of aggravation.

At Apple’s instance I had to go get a replacement iPhone 6, which I didn’t think would work anyway (it didn’t), from the snotty-as-all-get-out “Genius” at the Apple Store. It changed nothing. As soon as I logged into iCloud with a pristine unconfigured iPhone 6, the behavior began again. He would not even look at the phone while I was sitting there. He felt that I was given a new phone for “free” and that he therefore was done and was not interesting in anything else. He told me to call AT&T about their data.

Displeased.

Well, I'll add my 2 cents - and I may be taking this to a whole new level. I have an iPhone 6 on T-Mobile, has been pretty uneventful.

Went to look at my bill for expense-reporting purposes, and saw a notice that I was over my data limit. That NEVER has happened, so I thought it odd.

Looked through my detailed current bill, and TONS of activity that I couldn't identify. Texts and internet connections. Lots of text activity from Mauritania. And Cummings, GA, of all places. Multiple texts per minute.

However, the big moment was when I went digging through my phone (thanks to many of the tips here), and saw that for the current period, my phone says that I have used 72.9 GB of Cellular Data! ***!?!??!?! And 45 GB of that is Hotspot, according to the data in System Services. I do use my phone for Hotspot internet, but it's never been that much!

Unfortunately, T-Mobile support is closed for the holiday. But I'll be talking to them tomorrow.

Very strange!

Hi Walter

Seems like you have tried everything! Can understand your frustration.

You've described my experience exactly, even down to suspecting iCloud as the problem.

Surprised and sorry to to hear that setting up the phone as new did not help you - it's a painful last resort, but seems to have worked for most others. (My data usage is still back to normal, and a fraction of the crazy data it was using before.)

Really hope you figure it out, wanted to smash my phone to bits as some point out of frustration.

Cheers,

Flutter

I'm suspecting iCloud drive as well; this problem only occurred after activating iCloud drive in Yosemite.

What is mystifying me is that there is no trace of this data being passed through any other source; the Data Monitor app shows not only the data consumed by the phone, but also where and when it occurred, and whether it is cell or wifi. When I track back through these locations and add up the data throughput it comes nowhere close to the data levels apparently being used by the phone.

I've done three things now. In Settings > iCloud drive I have "use mobile data" turned off.

I have Settings > General > Background app refresh turned off

In Settings > Mobile > Use Mobile Data for I have services turned on only for apps which need it; Weather, Banking, Travel info, Google Maps etc. all media apps, iTunes store, app store and anything which could potentially push cloud data to me without my express authorisation is turned off.

I've also stopped using Mail on my laptop while tethering. IMAP Mail with Gmail has gone from bad to worse since Lion when it became so bloated and resource hungry that I had to abandon one of my accounts because it took so long to churn through the dozens of notification emails I was getting. Accessing mail through a browser seems much more data efficient now.

I have always been a Mac evangelist and, up to a point, I still am. But it seems to me that Apple, in their determination to exert "control over the user experience" as they like to spin it, is becoming more and more like Microsoft used to be. I'm not about to jump ship but I can't rid myself of the feeling that operating systems that used to be very simple and intuitive have, in the last few years become increasingly opaque to the user.

You are correct! I could have sworn it was app size + cache...

I'm mystified though. The figures next to each app have been totally static with me for as long as I've had the phone, and some, like the Movies app, have had mobile data turned off from day one. I've never downloaded a single movie on my iPhone, I always record them off the TV, compress them and add them to the phone using iTunes sync so I can watch stuff on the go, yet the Movies app has 1.3Gb next to it.

Furthermore, even if I total up the usage of each individual app, none comes close to the several gigabytes of data traffic reported by my carrier.

I have had this problem since the 8.1.1 update. I have found a couple other threads dealing with the same thing both specific to 8.1.1. Based on the suggestion of Walter above I have been testing and testing this. At this point I seem to have gotten the data drain under control at least for the last 40 min or so I am not seeing the drain. In my situation I had verified the problem was specific to iCloud. I had eliminated the data drain by logging out of iCloud, however that of course, wasn't a permanent solution. I started modifying settings for iCloud drive on my computers that were connected to my account. First I logged out of iCloud from a couple older Macs. I did not see any immediate change in the data drain. I then disabled iCloud Drive on my Yosemite Mac and pretty immediately the data drain stopped. I then re-enabled iCloud Drive again and the drain started right back up again. I then started looking at what items are used for iCloud Drive and manually turned off all but Text Edit. Again the drain stopped. I re-enabled only the services I actually use with iCloud Drive at this point I have Preview, TextEdit, Pages and Numbers enabled and have not had any more Documents & Sync data usage over 175 KB that it initially used when I turned Cellular data on the last time more than 40 min ago. I currently have two Macs both running Yosemite both with all of the above services enabled for iCloud Drive and no data drain. I also opened each of those apps and opened documents that are stored in the iCloud drive and no cellular data has been used for Documents & Sync. Hope maybe this can help someone else who is having this same issue. As I have been writing this Documents & Sync used a little more data went from 175 KB to 196 KB however is not continuing to climb. When I noticed the up from 175 to 196 I had accidentally opened a Safari page from Handoff. I wondered if there was anything to that so I did it again intentionally and it then went from 196 to 208. Still not a drain but interesting that Handoff would use any cellular data as I thought it was a bluetooth service.

While it lasted 24 hours the fix was temporary. This afternoon the data drain started again going from under 1MB of Documents & Sync to 5.3 in a matter of a few min. I disabled iCloud drive on my computers again however that did not have any affect on the data drain this time. This is a very annoying bug.

This is a scam Apple says know nothin heard nothing there is no way I used 2 GB in 10 days Verizon is making lots of money and Apple is in on the scam

Am having all the same issues you all are having 6 hrs on the phone back and forth NOTHING

by by Apple am done with you