Manage your data usage in iOS when travelling
Posted in daily
We’re off to South East Asia later this month, and depending on the country, the roaming charges are expensive, even if you purchase a data bundle before hand. It turns out that Thailand is part of Swisscom’s World 1, but Cambodia is part of World 2, a more expensive group of countries.
Short of turning data roaming off all together, there isn’t a simple way of monitoring your data use abroad. I wish there was something akin to TripMode for the Mac on iOS… so I maintain a list of checks to perform before leaving :
- Check Data roaming (add data package or not)
- Turn off mail push fetch new data and set to manually
- Check Background updates
- Change to automatic carrier settings Mobile Data > Mobile Network
- Check WiFi VPN
- Turn iTunes auto updates mobile data off
- Turn Photo Mobile Data updates off
- Turn Mail mobile data off
- Turn Maps mobile data off
- Turn Music mobile data off
- Turn Video mobile data off
- Turn Books mobile data off
- Turn Podcast mobile data off
- Turn Safari Reading List data off
- Limit Background App Refresh to Wi-Fi only
- Check the list of app allowed to use mobile data
- Turn off iCloud Drive data off (bottom of list)
- Turn Wi-Fi Assist off
- Check how apps use Location Services
- Review Notifications
It reduced significantly my data usage without turning it off completely.