Which apps consume the most mobile data?

Facing the scenario where mobile data usage becomes increasingly popular among users, The applications that consume the largest amount of data on a daily basis are YouTube, which consumes up to 193 MB. During a typical five-minute use, Followed by Disney+which consumes 150 MB every five minutes, And AllTrailsWhich spends 155MB to use during the same time period.

Mobile data has seen a 20-30% annual increase in personal consumptionAccording to an Ofcom report. This system requires an Internet access plan through a telephone company, so, although you can usually contract for an unlimited data rate, on other occasions this option is conditional upon a specific number of megabytes.

On such occasions as they usually occur, for example, When contracting a roaming plan to get data in other countries, it is advisable to know how many MB each specific app consumesso you can manage its use and avoid consuming all available data. If this happens, your internet usage will be transferred to the WiFi connection.

To know how much mobile data an application consumes, it must be taken into account that every action performed through a data connection causes an expense.. This means, for example, that every word, image or video viewed through a smartphone’s web browser has its own data fingerprint, which is measured in megabytes. The same thing happens when you post a photo on Instagram or send messages via WhatsApp.

however, Not all actions or applications consume the same amount of MB. Under this premise, and in order to find out which applications consume the most data on smartphones, mobile Internet service company Holafly conducted a study that reflects the amount of megabytes consumed by some of the most frequently used applications with a typical usage time of five minutes.

To make these comparisons, From Holafly they examined the “appetite” for applications on an iOS smartphoneSpecifically the iPhone 15 Pro Max, And on an Android deviceand Xiaomi Redmi 9, data consumption collected using the My Data Manager app.

YouTube, Disney+, and Waze, those consume the most data

According to the data collected, YouTube ranks itself as the mobile app that consumes the most data overall, reaching a total of 193MB within five minutes of typical use. The streaming content service is placed behind the Google platform Disney+, which managed to use 150MB during the same time period. Likewise, the AllTrails hiking app is also among the top three most consumed apps, at 155MB.

It’s worth noting that YouTube and Disney+ are the two streaming apps that use the most mobile data compared to other video apps. For example, Prime Video consumes 97MB every five minutes, only two-thirds of the data consumed by Disney+ and half that consumed by YouTube. The same happens with Netflix or Apple TV, which reduce their consumption to 53 and 44 MB, respectively.

This is because, as Holafly pointed out, Streaming requires the use of very large video files. YouTube videos, for example, deliver 30 frames of visual information per second, plus audio, metadata and processing data, which increases consumption significantly.

AllTrails is another one of the apps that uses the most data. Likewise, in terms of the most popular travel apps, Waze, Hotels.com and Uber are other options that consume the most data, spending 110MB, 104MB and 102MB respectively.

This consumption is related to the amount of data required by the maps.The real-time transport network and the way corporate servers communicate with the application as detailed by Holafly. Despite all this, it is striking that in the case of Google Maps, the consumption is reduced to 87 MB in typical use.

Which networks consume the most mobile data?

With regard to social networks, Snapchat tops the list, consuming 101MB per five minutes. In this case, the application automatically downloads the content of posts in the background and stores it in the device cache for quick access. This is the reason behind the high data consumption.

According to the results obtained, Pinterest is the second social network that consumes the most mobile data. Specifically, it’s 85MB every five minutes, a cost partly caused by videos automatically playing when they’re 50% downloaded.

Threads is the third social network that uses the most data at 82MB per five minutesLikewise, it is followed by TikTok (79MB), Telegram (70MB), Instagram (69MB), Facebook (65MB), and X (50MB). However, keep in mind that the amount of data used by social media apps “may vary depending on usage,” Hollafly noted.

The data collected also shows that when using browsers, Safari, the default iOS browser, consumes the most mobile data “by a significant margin,” using 56MB every five minutes. According to the company, the explanation for this consumption may be related to the ability of developers to leverage Safari for third-party app functionality.

that way, Safari can use 69.7% more data than the second most consuming browser, Vivaldi, which uses 33MB, and more than twice as much as Firefox, which uses 27MB. Microsoft Edge is another browser that consumes more than 29MB. For its part, Google Chrome is able to reduce this data usage to 24GB every five minutes.

How to optimize mobile data usage?

To reduce this app data consumption, you should consider some guidelines, such as deactivating automatic synchronization of appsHolafly also shared. This will prevent data from starting to download from accounts that have been used on other devices to keep apps in sync.

next to, With video playing applications such as YouTube, it is recommended to watch content at a lower quality, for example, go from 1,080p to 240p. However, streaming sites tend to download the entire video in the background to avoid pausing playback. To limit this data usage, your video quality preferences must be pre-configured in the app.

For travel and map apps, you can download necessary maps and information via a WiFi connection before starting your trip or route.. This way, they will be able to access this data without having to use the Internet. The same thing happens with music and podcast apps like Spotify, which let you download songs and episodes to store on your smartphone.

next to, You can choose to disable automatic downloads and playback of contentFor example, in social networking applications, by configuring them so that unnecessary data usage is avoided, and only the content you want to see is downloaded.

Regarding the use of browsers, both iOS and Android have a save mode in the system configuration Which, although its effectiveness may vary between different applications, it manages to limit the amount of data used.