How To Economise And Manage Data Subscription On Android To Make It Last

Android devices are known to consume a lot of data due to its huge collection of autostart apps, apps that helps to drain your data thereby leaving you stranded and annoyed. Since fingers aren't equal, I thought I should show some of us how to properly economize and manage data subscription on android phone to make it last a bit longer. 13 USEFUL TIPS TO MANAGE DATA SUBSCRIPTION ON ANDROID 1. DONT BE TOO GENEROUS You earn very less monthly but wants to stay online, being too generous is gonna hurt you badly, you don't have to care about what they think of you. He's stingy and selfish!, just pose authority and not share data via Wi-Fi or even release phone for them to browse, some could invidiously download heavy files over your mobile internet. 2. BE WARY OF OPEN WI-FI CONNECTION (HOTSPOT) Some of us subscribe and after some days, whoop, it's all gone! folk, did you know that you might be dishing out free data in your neighbourhood. Many non tech savvy individual still have a problem with this feature, knowing what it truly does. I will give you a break down. If you intend to share WiFi with friend then do this... A. Enable Bandwidth Throttling: This feature enables you to share limited bandwidth with friends, you can restrict users to your desired data speed for instance; you can share only 18kb/s. See image below. B. Block Users: Quickly block intruders stealing your Wi-Fi connection, by the way, this must have been your mistake because you didn't do the tip 3 below. C. Set Wi-Fi Password: Always set WI-FI password before enabling your hotspot. This is a very big mistake some of you make. Learn to set password, see How-to guide below.. How To Setup Wi-Fi Network On Android Steps Navigate to Settings Click more and click tethering and hotspot. Click Wi-Fi hotspot Click Set Up Wi-Fi Network Give it your preferred name by typing in the Network name box. Tap on security, a drop down box should appear showing None/WPA2 PSK. None should appear in default which means network is open so choose WPA2 PSK to enter your preferred Network password. Tip 1: Make sure the password is alphanumeric, a combo of numbers and letters(upper and lower cases) that should be hard to guess by friends. 3. CONSTANTLY CHANGE Wi-Fi PASSWORD You might not know whom you've previously revealed and given access to your phone's Wi-Fi connection so ill advise that your Wi-Fi password should be constantly updated or changed. See Tip 1 on how to go about it or read my write-up on how to create a very strong password. 4. RESTRICT APP BACKGROUND DATA Most apps running of your smartphone gains automatic access to the Internet as soon as it discovers there's an active internet connection. Apps such as WhatsApp, Facebook, BBM and more rely on these background data to constantly give you instant message alerts. So therefore, managing your data also requires you to disable certain unwanted app(s) from using your internet automatically. How To Restrict App Background Data (All Apps And Services) Steps Navigate to settings Go to data usage Locate and tap on the 3-dot option button at the top right of the data usage screen then tap to open. Click on restrict app background data. NB: if you restrict app background data, some apps and services won't work unless you're connected to Wi-Fi. The above method stops all apps and services on your phone from automatically connecting to the internet. However, the idea is not to disable all but to stop certain unwanted apps from connecting to the internet... Follow the steps below to stop certain apps individually from auto using background data. How To Restrict App Background Data (Certain Apps And Services) Steps Navigate to settings Go to data usage Tap on the network option used to browse. (You should see a full list of apps connecting to the Internet therein) Locate and open the app you intend to restrict. Below the selected app click on restrict app background data. (See image below) NB: THIS feature stops that particular app/services from secretly connecting to your mobile network. Tip 2: You can have more control over certain app by clicking on the App Settings, this gives you more control to tweak its settings. For instance, you can control how images loads on apps such as browser via app Settings. Note that this option isn't available on all app. 5. UNINSTALL LESS USED APP A couple of us wants to have the whole playstore app installed all at once, what's the deal... Your phone isn't a store so why have too many useless apps installed on them. There are frequently used apps and less frequently used ones too, it's advisable to uninstall apps you really don't use. Some of these apps could be the bada$$ racking all your data. My friend, just take them down, they are redundant! 6. WEB BROWSING PAYS OFF I know it's cool having instant messages, notifications right at your disposal anytime of the day but i can categorically tell you that, web browsing your favourite sites can be economical 'data-wise'! What this means is that, visiting websites such as Facebook, Twitter and the likes is well more preferable than using their mobile applications. Mobile apps consumes more data when it cones to browsing than the web browsers. Whereas, you must have tuned down your web browsers before applying this method. See Tip 2 above for more insight. Tip 3: Try Opera Mini web browser, it helps to optimise web pages by reducing its visual quality. It minifies it's content images, web text and more. 7. DATA USAGE WARNING NOTIFICATION This notification can be set in data usage option, it's a warning notification you get when you've exceed your set data over a specific period of time. Why do i need this? It serves as a warning sign to inform you that you've exceeded your monthly data limit. This is helpful when you are using your mobile internet because not all the network providers gives you a warning message displaying the amount of data you've consumed over certain period of time so this feature is pre built-in all Android device to notify you instantly. How To Set Data Usage Warning On Android Steps Go to settings Click on data usage option Tap on the network option used to browse. Switch on mobile data Set data limit by dragging the horizontal bar up and down till you get your desired data limit. NB: When this limit is reached, you should get a notification on your notification panel. 8. SAY NO TO UP/DOWN LOADING You just bought a data package of 3GB and wants to upload or download a file of about 2GB, this is not the very best idea.. Because, you can never get unlimited data from any of our so-called network providers. This is the sole reason you have to be conservative on the way you download files. Mind you, this is for the "data managers" here and not for the ones capable of subscribing. So, it's either you restrict yourself from uploading or downloading heavy files or you totally abstain from uploading or downloading via mobile internet. 9. BE WARY OF DATA CONSUMING APPS My fellow Instagram lovers posting videos and HD images.. Hehe, this is high time to say bye bye to instagraming on your mobile device over mobile internet. Am not trying to paint Instagram bad, but I'm just telling you to be careful Instagram is just one of many apps that consumes too much data. If you truly want to be frugal and manage data subscription on android to make it last longer then I'll advise you to stop Instagramming. Instagram app is solely based on short videos and images, nothing more, these two thing needs data to work. Not just Instagram, our beloved Facebook app is a culprit plus there are so many others out there. What should I do? Just follow point 6 above, Web it! 9. REDUCE DATA USAGE ON WHATSAPP You can hardly find a smartphone without WhatsApp, WhatsApp is a chat application that allows one to instantly send and receive messages, share files, media and lots more. WhatsApp also have a way of helping you to exhaust your data if you didn't put some things right. WhatsApp will automatically download pictures and videos shared with you via groups or private chats. So it's paramount you reset your WhatsApp auto-media download to not download these media files without your permission. Secondly, if you're the type that uses WhatsApp calling feature then you might as well follow the procedure below to reduce data usage on WhatsApp calls. Lastly, belonging to multiple groups can be very interesting but the negative side is, be ready to give up a lot of data for it. If you want to conserve data, try to streamline your groups to only very meaningful and useful ones. How To Stop Auto Media Download & Reduce Call Data Usage On Whatsapp Steps Go to settings Click on chat and calls Select media auto download. Tick "Low data usage". (This helps you lower the amount of data used during WhatsApp call) Then click on "when using mobile data", then tick the ones you wish to automatically download when using mobile data. NB: Voice messages are always automatically downloaded. 10. DO NOT STREAM VIDEOS ONLINE You can't be streaming videos online if you want your data to last longer, now that almost all social media apps now support video plus some website with YouTube embeds, be very careful when and when not to watch them because these videos can be data consuming. 11. SAY NO TO FREQUENT APP UPDATES This is one part that gets me really annoyed, I've seen people waste their hard earned data downloading app updates every now and then. The truth is, they don't even know why they're updating those apps. App on your phone's store will continuously get updated to fix bugs, that's why you've always get app updates at an average of twice or more in weeks. What I usually do if I intend to make data (MB) last is... First, I'll make sure automatic app updates isn't turned on. Secondly, I caution the rate at which I update app frequently. But before that, I will see if there are any significant update on the app, eg, WhatsApp new update now support video calling. Looking at that, since we all have been expecting this new feature, it'd be then advisable to update your WhatsApp. Hope you dig? 12. COLLECT APPS INSTEAD OF DOWNLOADING I know someone that is very vulnerable of this, he finds joy in downloading even when he knows I have the updated version of some of his apps. This is indeed a perfect way to kill megabytes, don't know whether to call it being lazy or being ignorant. Instead of wasting data downloading or updating apps..why not set up Xender/Flash Share so as to collect files and other apps over Wi-Fi. Infact, it's faster than downloading. 13. COMPRESS PICTURES BEFORE UPLOADING Image compression allows you to reduce the sizes of pictures using a smart photo minify tool either pre-installed or via Android mobile apps. Pictures taken on Android are usually very heavy, some are as large as 3MB, there are millions of pictures uploaded everyday on our social media pages and apps. Assuming you reduced the size of a 3MB sized picture to about 200Kb, this saves you a considerable 2.8MB amount of data when uploaded on your social media account compared to uploading 3MB, the same case as to when you download them. You can check out how to compress picture on your Android phone without using any application. In conclusion: In times of limited data subscription and expensive data tariffs, these are some of my very important ways of economising data on Android to make it last longer. So try as much as possible to utilise two or more tips above, you'd be surprise how long your data would last! Let me know if you have some tricks you've tried by commenting below. [/nextpage]

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How To Economise And Manage Data Subscription On Android To Make It Last

13 USEFUL TIPS TO MANAGE DATA SUBSCRIPTION ON ANDROID

1. DONT BE TOO GENEROUS

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