Internet Data Usage on iOS

Monzo Chat
#1

According to my iPhone’s data usage stats, Monzo has used 47.3MB of mobile data over the last 4 days. This seems like a crazy amount - if that continues it’ll have used over a quarter of a GB by the end of the month. I don’t think I’ve been using the app especially heavily.

The only thing I can think of is that maybe it’s downloading my entire transaction history every time I open the app? I’ve probably got thousands of transactions in there as I’ve been using Monzo as my main card for about two years now.

I’m going to have to disable data usage for Monzo for now, which is really inconvenient. Is anyone else experiencing this and is there any way it can be fixed?

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#2

How are you measuring it? I almost feel like the counter hasn’t reset properly and is accounting for usage over a much larger period, because that does sound excessive for what essentially is downloading just a bunch of text… do you have a lot of saved receipts by any chance?

#3

Do you have automatic updates from the App Store turned off?

#4

For my own data, according to Settings->Cellular, Monzo has only used 68MB since 18th Jan, averaging 17MB/month. So no where near as high as yours.

2 Likes
#5

Those wouldn’t count anyway. App updates are accounted for separately under the name of a system service.

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#6

I’m measuring it in the Mobile Data section in iOS settings. I reset the statistics on Wednesday night, so that’s 47.3MB over 4 and a bit days. A few saved receipts but not loads, and I haven’t been trying to view them so no reason they should be downloading.

#7

Mine is 600MB since December, average 100MB a month. No problem as I have loads of Data… I do attach receipts to most transactions so I think mine might be that…

#8

I’ve used 274MB since 1 November, so that’s like 39MB/ month. :thinking: if you’ve used up that much in just four days it seems a little weird! Have you been accessing the forum or anything in-app?

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#9

Yeah i’m assuming that’ll be because of receipts - i’m average about 40MB/mo

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#10

No, nothing like that. I paid a few people and transferred some money into a pot, that’s pretty much all I’ve done.

#11

26Mb since 6th December… how are people achieving such high results? :eyes:

#12

From what I’ve observed on Android, after an app update it seems to nuke its local database of transactions and re-downloads the whole thing again (as evidenced by a spinner for a while) - could this account for it, is it the same on iOS?

Though hitting the developers API, my compressed JSON is 158k for all my prepaid transactions and 190k for my current account ones, so that’s not exactly super massive.
I think I’ve only ever saved receipt images a couple of times though, but I’d be surprised if they were all (re-)downloaded up front and not on demand.

#13

That sounds like the most likely culprit then. I really don’t use receipts that much though. Maybe once or twice a month.

#14

I haven’t updated the app in the last four days, but maybe there is some refreshing of the cache going on.

I just checked my list of transactions through the API and it’s coming in at over 3MB. That’s a lot, but it would mean it’s downloaded the list around 15 times over the last 4 days, which doesn’t seem right (and that’s only counting the times I wasn’t on WiFi). There must be something else contributing to that 47.3MB.

It doesn’t look like receipts are downloaded until you actually try to view them so I’m not sure it’s that, but I could be wrong.

EDIT: Just been thinking - I’ve had over 20 transactions since I reset my data usage stats. If the Monzo app downloads every single transaction again when it needs to refresh for new transactions, it’s definitely possible it would have downloaded that 3MB transaction list 15 times.

#15

Quick update. I just tested this out by looking at the data usage, opening Monzo, letting the transaction list update, then checking the data usage stats again. It went up by about 1.5MB. I took a screen recording as proof!

So I am now fairly certain this is because I’ve been a heavy user for a long time and I have a lot of transactions. I expect this will affect more people as time goes on, so I’ll send a message to the support team about it tomorrow. Hopefully it can be changed so the app doesn’t download the entire transaction list every time. Thanks everyone who responded.

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Error Screen
#16

Can you report back any info you get from support?

1 Like
#17

Am I misunderstanding something? You are just opening the app and telling it to refresh the transaction data. You haven’t cleared any cache or data?

If that’s the case, then that’s pretty silly, isn’t it?! Surely it should just get the delta. What is it going to do in 20 years time? Sit there for an hour downloading a few GB of transaction data everytime you open the app?

Have you reported it to support?

1 Like
#18

Since I bought my iPhone X on the 17th December the financial apps I installed at that time are currently on:

Transferwise 663 KB
Smile 1.7 MB For my credit card
Revolut 10.8 MB
RBS 7.6 MB This is currently my main bills account
PayPal 3.3 MB
Nutmeg 2.8 MB
MBNA 61 KB For my other credit card
KBC Ireland 480 KB
First Direct 1.6 MB
Bunq 2.6 MB

and Monzo… 150 MB!

Obviously I use all these a lot differently which will affect the result, some hardly ever and others a lot. Some I only check at home on wifi and others more on the go like Monzo. I do however use RBS quite often to check my bills balance and amend standing orders etc. I have 30GB internet per month so this isn’t an issue for me, but it is an interesting read.

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#19

That’s right, just opening the app, nothing fancy. And yep, pretty silly. Hopefully they’ll fix it before then :stuck_out_tongue:

I have sent a message in the chat to support, but I haven’t had a reply and I don’t see it in my chat history, so maybe it got lost somewhere. If I haven’t heard back by tomorrow I’ll send it again.

I’ll let you all know what they say of course.

2 Likes
#20

You now have to press send twice to send a message. The first time when you compose the message and hit Start Conversation it then takes you to the proper chat interface with your message already composed. You then have to tap Send to actually submit it. It’s confusing and I once lost a message as I cancelled out before tapping Send. :disappointed: