Why is Android OS using so much data?

[lectraplayer]

What is Android OS doing with the data it's going through? It goes through a couple gigs a month, and is my second most data hungry "app" and I can't find a way to do anything about it. This is with all syncing and any background stuff turned off (Including Play Store). It is enough that I have to up my data plan well beyond what I actually use. What is doing this?

 

[bcrichster]

What is Android OS doing with the data it's going through? It goes through a couple gigs a month, and is my second most data hungry "app" and I can't find a way to do anything about it. This is with all syncing and any background stuff turned off (Including Play Store). It is enough that I have to up my data plan well beyond what I actually use. What is doing this?

I've been noticing that the newer OS's are using more and more data as well.. Google has been forcing app updates, stupid ads do it (so get the pro versions), newer app versions are constantly transferring data due to more capabilities..
So yeah, I got sick of it as well and busted back down to KitKat 4.4 plus uninstalled all app updates I could.. Data doing much better too.

 

[lectraplayer]

Thanks for the thought, but if I only have a couple gigs of data, which I have recently upped from, I will have an overage as soon as any app checks its data. My question is how to block this excessive data use to where I can at least go on WiFi to do this data intensive OS maintenence? So far, I have bettet control of the apps themselves than I do from the OS.

That also eliminates the newer devices, and you know somebody will discontinue allowing the old apps on their servers to force an upgrade to a version that we can't run on our older OSs.

 

[electricpete]

I'm on 6.0.1 and two weeks into my billing period and I've used 1.15GB data total, but android os had only used 16MB of data (android os is way down on my list, about 10 other apps have used more).

I do have a root firewall and have blocked things like kernel packets which have no useful purpose that I know of. Firewall log is full of blocked data packets, but I don't know how to translate that to mb. I also have my data on only about 4 hours a day away. I do use a lot of Google voice commands while on data.

I'm curious how others stack up. If I had to guess, I'd suspect most do not have such high data usage from android as op. I suspect it's related to backup or sync settings somehow. But I could be wrong about that.

 

[tommo47]

I have something similar to @electricpete - looking at my data usage (mobile data + wifi) over the last 4 months Android OS shows a usage of about 200Mb with a total data usage of about 25Gb - less than 1%.

HTC M9, Android 5.1

 

[mikedt]

Turn off automatic syncing and automatic app updates, or switch them to WiFi only.