Stepping into the present, buying an iphone 6 - and having lots of questions. The manual doesn’t help a whole lot. Don’t know a good source to find out so here I am. Presuming you’re out of wifi range, when does the clock start on data use? When you turn it on? When you access your e-mail? When you are on Facebook? When does the clock stop? When you close those applications? Etc. Thanks, Dopers.
There’s nearly always going to be some kind of data trickling back and forth. If your plan is that small that it’s a concern, put it in Airplane mode when you’re not using it. But, FTR, facebook, email etc not only all use data, but both of them use data even when they’re not open. Email checks the servers for new messages and both of those programs can receive push notifications. Short of force-quitting everything when you’re done, you’re always using something.
There should be a meter in your phone somewhere to see how much data you’ve used. If you don’t stream music, don’t live on your phone and hop on wifi when possible (or at least when you get home), about 1G a month plus or minus .5G is typical.
Trying to get this straight - if my phone is on and even if I’m not using it, I will be using some data while it checks periodically for e-mails? And it will be using some data via Facebook? And the only way to stop this is by “force-quitting”, i.e turning the phone off?
Incidental data is probably going to be in the tens of megabytes per day at the high end, and if you’re in wifi area you have access to it will preferentially download over wifi. Unless you have an archaic plan with extremely limited data, like 250mb/month, it’s very unlikely you will use a significant amount of it from background data.
Yes. Checking email, which it will do every few minutes (a setting you probably chose when you set it up), uses data.
Yes, facebook uses data. In fact, anything that accesses the internet uses data. Put your phone in airplane mode (ignoring making phone calls), if you can’t do it now, it uses data.
Force quitting is just a term for pulling up a task manager (don’t know what iPhone calls it) and stopping the application. Your email is always checking for new messages, Facebook is always active in case it gets a notification, even your phone itself is periodically checking for system updates. If you’re truly that worried about it, you can save a few megs by making sure these things are totally shut down.
Also, just be be clear, force quitting doesn’t have anything to do with turning the phone off.
You can turn cellular data off in Settings without going into airplane mode. Then you can still receive calls.
The Mrs. and I share a 250MB data plan. We use about 2/3 of it most months, mostly by relying on WiFi at home and work/client locations. In general, we don’t use any unexpected amount on “overhead” but some apps can nibble away keeping lists updated and so forth. (The worst offender was MLB At Bat, which in the most recent incarnation steadily ate 100MB over April, more than 50 times what it used to draw. I had to nuke it and replace it with an inferior clone because I couldn’t spare half my data allowance to keep all its details current.)
In general, don’t worry about such overhead and handshake data usage, and get in the habit of turning off network data whenever you’re (1) in a wifi zone like home and (2) really don’t need instant/push updates or communication. You’ll find you can get by with a MUCH cheaper data plan - and with most, breaking into the next tier only costs about as much as that plan would have cost you anyway.
On Android, you can put the network data toggle in the pull-down toolbar. Not sure what equivalent works on the iPhone. Makes it easy to turn on and off. Putting your carrier’s data usage meter on a prominent page helps, too.
You can set each app on an iPhone to NOT use cellular data if you so desire.
Just to clarify: Data usage isn’t measured by time (i.e. minutes) like talk usage, it’s measured in data transferred (i.e. megabytes or gigabytes per month). So it doesn’t matter if your signal is weak or strong (i.e.if a web page loads slowly or quickly), because ultimately it’s still the same number of bytes.