Rating: Turn off all those ‘data hog’ apps
It’s so easy to do. As an Android handset owner you download a multitude of apps. Then – despite many tariffs offering ‘unrestricted’ data usage – you suddenly find you’re landed with unexpected data bill. Trying manually to sort out the mess and close apps that aren’t essential is both frustrating and time consuming. Which is why Onavo has finally ported its award winning app over from iOS to Android. It is available now for free on the Android market. It provides a decent level of level of flexibility so you can control all of those apps which seem to have acquired a mind of their own. For example, Onavo Lite app flags the chief culprits and allows users to make apps ‘WiFi only’ – effectively stopping the data leakage. Onavo has researched which apps are the biggest mobile data ‘hogs’. It is also hoping that by applying ‘crowdsourcing’ techniques to the app, it will provide instant advice to user on whether or not newly downloaded apps are data hogs or likely to cause issues with data plans. One problem with the existing Android ecosystem is that apps can run constantly in the background, meaning that users have no control and no way to limit the data that is used.
According to Onavo’s CEO, Guy Rosen, “The flip side of Android’s openness is that apps are free to use up mobile data without any accountability.
Just power up your phone and a hundred apps could spring to life and eat up your data plan.”
Most consumers have little accurate knowledge of which apps are the biggest mobile data hogs.
So the company decided to do some research reviewing over eight terrabytes of mobile data.
They company found that in the USA, the Top Five data hogging activities were: -video and music streaming (35 per cent of all mobile data).
This was followed by web browsing (20 per cent); an App Store (13.5 per cent); navigation (8.3 per cent) and email (4 per cent). Somewhat unexpectedly Facebook came in sixth with 2.8 per cent.
“We are all addicted to data, but like junkies we don’t stop and count the cost – we just want our hit,” Rosen observed.
He continued, “With capped plans now the norm, we’re here to remove the confusion and baffling small print to make it clear and simple.”
GoMo News downloaded the app to our loan Motorola Defy. However, the app didn’t manage to load defaults for our existing data provider – Orange. Hopefully, crowdsourcing will soon overcome this failing.
Probably, most crucially the app provides alerts and warnings when the handset owner is ‘roaming’ – travelling outside the home market. That’s when most serious cases of ‘bill shock’ are generated.
Even without compressing data – a feature which is coming soon – we feel Android users urgently needed the control offered by Onavo Lite,” Rosen claimed.
