Featured Image Credit: Milan Markovic / NurPhoto / Contributor / Getty
We all know the pain of getting near the end of the month on your phone contract and getting a message to say you're running low on data.
It can mean a few days of cutting down on your phone use, or could even leave you forced to turn off data entirely to avoid extra charges.
If you're on an iPhone, though, there's a really simple set of steps that you can follow to make sure you're fully aware of which apps on your phone are actually guzzling your data.
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After all, it's one thing if you're watching YouTube in high-definition all day while out and about, or if you use Spotify constantly to stream new music, but if you're not sure where the leakage is coming from, this could be ideal for you.
On your iPhone, just open the Settings and then tap on Mobile Services (or Mobile Data in the US).
This will take you to a page summarizing all of your data usage, including a list of all the apps on your phone and how much data they've used.
However, the first time you visit it your iPhone will just be showing you the data that each app has used since the day you first turned it on, which isn't actually that helpful.
The next step you should take is to scroll right down to the very bottom of this page (which could be a long way down if you have a lot of apps). Here, you'll see the option to Reset Statistics, which will start these counters over again.
From this point, it's a simple matter of setting a reminder in your calendar or using the Reminders app, and dating it one month in the future.
Then, when a month has passed, you can revisit this page and see an actual month's breakdown of which apps have been consuming data in what quantities.
This is massively useful in letting you know if an app you weren't expecting is actually siphoning your data allowance away more than you realised.
If that's the case, one useful tip is to turn off the app's ability to refresh itself in the background, which can stop it from accidentally taking up some data while you're not using it. You can do this by accessing the app's settings in the main list of apps on the Settings homepage.
Another option in this same settings list is to turn off the ability of an app to access mobile data at all - if you do this, you'll only be able to use the app on the internet if you're connected to Wi-Fi, meaning it won't have any way to drain your data while you're on 4G or 5G.
