Charging for a Bug
Do you remember my complaints last month about Apple’s Podcasts app chewing through my wife’s data allowance and costing me $15? Well, that’s not the half of it. I’ve been trying to track down the culprit that has been causing my wife and I both to significantly exceed our data plan limits in July and August. At first, based on AT&T’s reports, I thought something was causing enormous cellular data downloads in the middle of the night, even though the phone was on my WiFi network and plugged into power. I finally figured out, however, that AT&T only checks the phone’s data use occasionally, and reports it all in one chunk at the time it checks. So, I was actually seeing an entire day’s worth of data use logged in the middle of the night. Still, I had to figure out why I was burning through as much as 70 MBs in a day.
I tried an application called DataMan, but it only told me how much was being used, not which app was using it. Then, this morning, after learning that I had once again exceeded my quota, I found My Data Manager, which graphs the data user per application. I installed it and got it set up. After my morning commute, I checked it to find that the Podcasts app had used about 20 MBs since I left my house. I had been listening to a podcast all the way to work, but the audio file is on my iPhone. Podcasts knows that it is there, because it isn’t showing the download button beside it.
Apparently, it is ignoring the fact that I have the file locally, and it is streaming it over the cellular network!
That does it. I’m trashing the Podcasts app and going back to listening to my Podcasts in the Music app. This bug has probably cost me around $100 in unnecessary data use.
