Many Android apps are designed to use data in the background and they eats up your mobile data without your knowledge – which is a great issue, especially if you are on a monthly subscription plan. To make matters worse it is not always obvious which apps are the culprits. Some apps lets you chose whether they are allowed to use the data in background, but not all by any means.
Android Ice Cream sandwich and later include some useful features to view and restrict the data use of apps. You can see how much data your apps are consuming in the background and if you find anything unusual, you can tell Android to restrict data use of these apps that are eating into your precious monthly allowance.
How to restrict data use of apps?
Go to Settings and select Wireless & Networks and then Data usage. At the top, you will see a graph of data usage over time. Scroll down to see all your apps that use background data.
Tap on any apps that you suspect could be using lots of data. Data usage is shown as two figures: Foreground and Background.
Foreground relates to when you are actually using the app, while Background is what it is using behind the scene.
To restrict data use, if you think an app is using too much data in the background, scroll down and tap on “Restrict background data”. Keep in mind that this may affect you app’s normal operation.
