My son has an iPhone 5 with Verizon. This is part of our family share five phone deal. He’s the only one who uses outrageous amounts of data. Not because he streams videos or music, but mostly because his phone seems to have apps or something similar that update twice a day…at exactly 12 hour intervals. He unfortunately works at a job from 7Am to 3PM and has no wifi access. He also has no wifi access from midnight-6AM while he sleeps. And that’s when these gremlins operate.
Any thoughts on what’s causing this? Ap updates? Something else?
Settings->Cellular Data will bring up a list of all apps, and their cellular data usage. You can reset the count, and then wait and see what’s using the data, and then turn it off in the same panel.
Look for ‘Automatic Downloads’ and turn all the automatic downloads to off.
Also in Settings>Itunes and Appstore, look for ‘Use Cellular Data’ and turn that off for good mesure.
If the updates is not causing this, I advise installing either ‘my data manager’ or ‘Onovo count’. These free apps (from the app store) will, from the installation point forward, keep track of what is using the cellular data.
Backup apps can be bandwidth hogs. He needs to make sure to turn off auto-update or auto-sync or whatever the setting is called in his particular app. Then he can manually backup when he’s on wifi.
That’s way more than just normal app updates. The only time I go over 3GB in a month is if I have to do a full backup and restore from a factory reset. I have over 100 apps that all update automatically and they only use a few MB a month compared to the gigs of movie and music data I use on top of all my pics synching with facebook and uploading to the cloud.
Definitely check if there’s some kind of full backup happening. It’s unnecessary unless he’s factory resetting and restoring the thing all the time. With an iPhone, that should be very rare.