Google Services & Minimizing Mobile Data

[wayloncovil]

Hi, Everyone!

So yesterday, I booted by phone and it used about 20 MBs of Mobile Data before I had a chance to connect to WiFi. I'm running Marshmallow on my Moto X PE using MintSim and I have Google Play Store set to download updates over WiFi only. Auto updates were happening so I'm pretty sure that it was the Play Store that was using the data. I checked both Google Play services and Google Play Store and they don't have background data restricted so those are probably the culprits.

In general, the only thing that I really want to use mobile data is Google Messenger (for texts), Hangouts, Signal and other messaging apps.

I understand that some of them use Googles GCM for push notifications and not exactly sure what Messenger needs to download MMSes.

If I want to disable background data for as many applications as I can, "except for the messaging apps mentioned above), what Google services must I allow background data for to keep my messaging apps happy?

Thanks!

 

[andMego]

Why not try disable background data for them all (besides the messaging apps) and see if it works by sending yourself test messages from a different phone?

 

[wayloncovil]

Why not try disable background data for them all (besides the messaging apps) and see if it works by sending yourself test messages from a different phone?

@andMego, I had a bit of an "oh duh" moment after reading your response so thank you.
I did as you suggested. I found that Google Play Services is the winner. Once I had that enabled, my GCM alerts started working. This was on my Moto X PE.
Our family also has a Huawei phone. It was much harder to find Google Play Services because of EMUI but I did find it under apps. From their, I could enable and disable Google Play Services.