Q: IOS 8 High Cellular Data Usage

This is getting frustrating. At least I'm not the only one with this issue. I have 3 phones on my plan, my 6 Plus, a 5S, and a 3G. When I look at the data usage, the 5S and the 3G are using tiny amounts of data. My 6Plus however, is using about 300 mb a day even when it's on wifi, even with cellular data turned off. I also notice large amounts of data being used in odd 3 hour intervals usually when I'm sleeping, connected to wifi, and have cellular data turned off. I've had an iphone since 2009, and never had to worry about turning off location services, or cellular data, and I went over once in all those years. That was last month. My device says I've used about 194 mb since my billing cycle began two days ago. According to att however, I've used about 700.

I've had cellular data turned off all day today until lunch. Somehow, in about 30 minutes with just light browsing (mainly, the at&t app) I've used about 70 mbs. I'm only a couple days into my billing cycle, and if I don't really police my cellular usage, I'll easily go over by next week. AT&T has offered nothing helpful, and from what I'm reading on this forum, neither has Apple.

I've turned almost everything off on my phone, still using data. If I check my data using the *DATA# option while connected to wifi, and cellular turned off, I notice that it doesn't increase. But, if I check the at&t app a few hours later, it'll say that my phone has been using cellular data at different intervals this whole time. Maybe, I'll try setting it up as a new device later, and see what happens. Would a new sim change anything?

you might want to turn off cellular data in two other places in addition to individual apps under settings / cellular, if you haven't already done so, and see what happens:

1. Settings / ICloud / Documents & Data, toggle "use cellular data" to off
2. Settings / Itunes & Apps Store, toggle "use cellular data" to off

That's all I did with my iphone 5 on ios8, and my data usage is normal on that.  With my wife's iphone 6, I have all the apps turned on for cellular data use, and those two settings turned off, and her data usage is normal, i.e. averaging 22 mb a day.  But with her phone, I erased all data and settings and set it up as a new phone as well, and did NOT restore from backup but, rather, added back the apps from ITUNES, which might have something to do with it.  Oh, and I also have Automatically Back Up / Icloud turned off (you do that with the phone hooked up to your computer with ITunes open), but that's only supposed to happen, even if you have it turned on, if you're on wifi, I think, so maybe that is not needed.

Oh, and I also, just in case, turned off, in ITUNES with the iphone hooked up to it, automatic backups to ICloud.  Supposedly that only does a backup when you're on wifi, but just out of caution, I turned that off too.

Thank you, I will try this on our three phones (iPhone 5s  and iPhone 6). Hopefully this fixes it because we are halfway through our data with a week to go when before we rarely used 1gb.  I'm wondering if verizon knew this was an issue because with each iPhone upgrade we got an additional gb of data.  If we hadn't gotten the additional 3 gb of data, we'd have used up the original 4gb that we had all along. 

I still think Apple needs to fix the problem. We shouldn't have to shut down cellular settings while on Wifi In order to avoid data use.  It was working fine before ios8.

fix this, Apple!

I am sorry to say that this has not been fixed in 8.1

steps I took...

1. Reset cellular data usage with cellular data turned off in settings > cellular

2. Downloaded 8.1 with cellular turned off (in wifi)

3. Phone came back, checked cellular data (off) used 2 kb. Assumed this was activation data.

4. Turned on celluar data for YouTube watched two minutes of a video. Paused and checked usage... Wham 53mb used while in wifi.

5. Got angry......

I find it completely ridiculous that Apple is still telling its customers that this is the first time they've heard of the problem. Shouldn't this thread be enough proof that the problem is not an isolated one?

Anyway, as Mitton79 and Flutt3r have mentioned upthread, the very non-ideal solution for this problem is to set up your phone as new. It is a complete and utter chore, and took me about 36 hours of trial and error in order to manually add my personal data back onto the phone, but I can confirm it has worked for me for the last week. Restoring the phone from new also appears to have the bonus effect of speeding up the phone a bit.

To clarify, I did not try wiping the phone and restoring from a buggy backup, as I just didn't have the time and enough data on my plan for such experimentation.

On a related note, I used a program called iBackupBot to manually add most of my personal data back onto the "new" phone. For some reason, iCloud did not work for me (another rant for another thread). I tried using iCloud to sync my WhatsApp history, calendar, notes, contacts and reminders, but after restoring my phone from new, my iCloud backup would randomly sync only some of those, never all. Plus, because it was my first time backing up the above to iCloud, it took hours for the backup to complete. Eventually, I just gave up and used iBackupBot for all of the above.

I used this excellent guide to restore my SMSes: http://www.idownloadblog.com/2014/03/06/how-to-back-up-restore-sms-messages/

After a little digging around, I also used iBackupBot to restore:

- Photos and videos

- Whatsapp chat history

- calendar

- notes

- contacts

- reminders

I then re-downloaded all my apps from the App Store (took the opportunity to cull quite a few) and re-added my music collection from my iTunes library.

I lost all my progress for most of my games, but I had pretty much run out of steam by that point and just wanted to get the whole thing over and done with.

I already had cellular off to iTunes, but not to iCloud. shut it off at 11:48. We'll see if that's the problem... I've tried everything else with my daughter's phones prior to returning them. Last major effort on her iPhone 6 was a complete reset to factory settings through iTunes, and then left phone without any additional apps other than iOS8 default apps. Still received data charges in 6 hour intervals. When apps were added a day later, they were downloaded from App Store. I think we only added one of two but the cyclical charges remained...

Now that she's back to iPhone 4s, the data bleed is over. She's only using an average of 0.003 GB per day. The every-6-hour charges are GONE. She is running iOS 8 (NOT 8.0.2) on her phone and it will STAY THAT WAY. cellular is enabled for EVERYTHING including apps updatingvin background. Only shut off for App Store since that mysteriously showed 2.9 GB of data on data-bled phones. Only other setting that appears different IS THE CARRIER VERSION. My iPhone 6 running 8.0.2 is running VERIZON 17.0. Her 4s is running VERIZON 16.0.

Now for a little history I've learned with all of the research I've done. On September 30, 2012 a verizon iPhone Carrier update was issued because of CELLULAR DATA LEAKS THAT WERE OCCURRING OVER WI-FI NETWORKS. It was Verizon Carrier Setting 13.1. Sound familiar to anyone??? Apparently our tweaking settings is USELESS. Verizon Carrier software 17.0 issued by Apple is severely flawed, and won't improve until a carrier update is once again released... In our case, it's leaking data all day long, not just when being actively used on wifi.

I Did everything you did... Reset completely through iTunes and did not do "backup". I reinstalled just a few apps after a day or so -- but still had the charges every 6 hours being posted to my data log. Did you have that too before your reset? What about after?

I'm using iOS 8.0.2.

Before my reset, I was clocking 360MB to 450MB of data usage per day. My typical daily usage is around 100 MB per day.

I set up my phone as new about a week ago, and haven't had the problem since (fingers crossed) - I'm not sure why it hasn't worked for you

After becoming aware of the problem, I only observed the problem for 2 days before I tried the reset as I was running out of data for the month.

My data drain was coming from "Settings" --> "Mobile" --> "System Services" ---> "Documents & Sync".

The data use appeared suddenly, in one go, in between my scheduled hourly checks on both days. The sudden data usage was close to 300MB on both days, at roughly the same time in the afternoon.

The Apple technician mentioned that, with iOS8, "more items" were being backed up to iCloud - apparently this cannot be turned off. Similar to the original poster Mitton79, I had all forms of unnecessary data usage turned off, including disabling iCloud, Siri, etc.

My best guess is that my backup had become corrupted or buggy somehow, and didn't play well with iOS 8. I've been adding onto the same backup file since 2007.

I did also notice that, after restoring from new, a couple of options under Settings looked very different. For example, under "Settings" --> "Mobile" --> "System Services", I suddenly had a lot more items listed there that I didn't have before.

iI'm not sure how or why resetting the phone as "new" resolves this issue. when using my ipad (does not have cellular capability), my connection is slow, as if it's looking for cellular versus wifi. i believe there is a problem with ios8 that Apple needs to fix.  We shouldn't have to reset our phones and basically start over just to stop a data drain caused by a faulty and buggy ios update from Apple! 

I agree.  Apple needs to fix whatever is going on with ios8.  We haven't changed our phone habits and went from using less than 1gb/month to 3.5 gb in 2 weeks!  Makes me wonder, now, why verizon is giving out a free 1gb of data for 2 years with every iphone upgrade.  Did they know the data would be out of control with new ios?!

Like dooror, I suspect iCloud syncing was using the excessive cellular data (even when it was not supposed to be using cellular data.)

Setting the phone up as new (didn't restore any backups) resolved it for me.  But it took a painful 8 hours to get all apps, settings, app data, user login and passwords etc. up and running again.

The only issue I still have is that "Time & Location" is still using large amounts of cellular data. (Settings->Cellular->System Services->Time & Location)

Of the 230MB cellular data used after a recent reset, 90MB has been used by "Time & Location". I suspect that there is an app not playing nicely with iOS 8 - "Waze" is currently my main suspect.

iOS 8 is showing high data usage (on either cellular or WiFi on iPhone) with Safari after browsing any variety of common websites, with either a Safari tab open or after closing all Safari tabs.  The data usage wheel continues to turn if Safari is left open, with data being used indefinitely, unless one uses "clear history and website data" in Safari settings.  This is clearly an iOS 8 error and huge problem when browsing using cellular data, with about 2-4 MB of data used per minute even though there is no actual browsing taking place.
After clearing Safari history and website data the problem resurfaces after some website browsing.
Apple - fix this.

Just had same issue...Never used more than 1.5 GB/mo....then got new iphone6 with ios 8 and I'm over 12 GB and the month isn't over yet. Chick from Verizon says it's social media apps that have changed the way their data refreshes and ***** significant data. I haven't changed the way I use my phone for the past several years and in one month I've supposedly used 6x the amount of data. Verizon won't reimburse any overages b/c "the phone is working the way it's supposed to". Lame. And they made me switch from my unlimited data plan to upgrade to this phone. Coincidence?

Is this happening only on Verizon or both Verizon and AT&T?