How to stop certain apps from eating away your data traffic

The days of squeezing the last megabyte of data in your phone plan are long gone, but that doesn't mean that we're ready to use up terabytes of data from our phones by essentially turning them into wireless routers. Most of today's apps are well designed to use up as little data as possible, and they're getting better at it as time goes on. However, bugs are unavoidable and every now and then I'll catch one of my apps going rogue and consuming hundreds of megabytes of traffic in the background, when my phone isn't even in use. Whenever this happens, I put the app "in quarantine" until a new version comes along, just to make sure that I'm safe. If you want to do the same, here's how:

How to restrict background data access for an app

The first thing you want to do is check the data usage on your phone. You do that by going to Settings, then tapping on Data Usage - pretty straightforward. The apps that use internet traffic will be displayed below the graph, and the ones that used the most data are towards the top, making it easy to spot the culprit. Once you found the app that used up more data than you're going to allow it to, tap on it. This will open up a menu with more details about the app and its data usage, and a useful feature that allows you to Restrict app background data. Once you activate that option, the app will no longer connect to the internet when it's in the background. In the case above, setting this on the YouTube app will still allow me to watch videos on the app, but whenever it's not running in the foreground it won't be able to download a single megabyte. And that's it! Have you had any issues with data usage on your phone? Did this help you solve them?

Image source: androidcentral.com