Expected behaviour: Minimal/reasonable mobile data usage
Current behaviour: 30.17 GB data used today
First occurred: Today/ongoing
Steps to reproduce: N/A
Environment: App settings allow for mobile data to be used for everything except auto download. Do use Bluetooth earphones, Tozo Open Ear Rings. I had only listened to episodes that were previously downloaded over wifi before the issue was noticed. Background data usage is listed as 250 MB. Foreground data usage is 29.93 GB. I can be certain about exact data usage as today is the first day of my phone plan billing cycle. I do use the app fairly constantly every day during work, and this is a new phenomenon. Previous billing cycle shows 2.72 GB total used with 2.65 GB foreground and 73.22 MB background.
Crash info: N/A
Love the app otherwise so hoping this can be fixed. You can understand my frustration when I noticed my mobile provider had throttled my data speeds as a result, and refused to offer any help when I called support. But that’s beside the point. I did do some searching around prior to posting, and have subsequently turned off cover art being allowed on mobile data as that seemed to be a slightly similar issue from awhile back. Have not noticed any change as of yet though.
Yup! Nothing unexpected in the downloads. I have not yet tried to shut off all mobile data usage from the app, but I may going forward if this reoccurs to test things further.
For an update, I have continued using the app near constantly today at work and the data usage is much more reasonable compared to yesterday. Total data usage for today and yesterday is now 30.36 GB with 252 MB background and 30.11 foreground. In fact, today I have been listening almost exclusively via streaming. The only setting I have changed since yesterday is turning off data permissions for cover photo downloads. My data speeds are also throttled right now so am unsure if that could possibly effect the issue too.
How often are you refreshing your feeds? I have ~100 pods and when I was set to refresh every four hours the app would use a few hundred MB/day. I don’t stream and only download over Wi-Fi so unless there is some other activity I’m unaware of you could be using a decent amount. And go to history and add up the total size of the shows you listened to in the time period you refer to. 30 GB does seem high though. But AP can use lots of data if you let it.
Edit: Also can you check your phone’s data settings to confirm it’s actually antennapod? Go to app info for the app and tap on Mobile data usage. This will show usage in line with what you have set for your “mobile data usage cycle” so if you want to see what antennapod has used in the past two days you’ll have to adjust that setting as well.
That’s on my pixel anyway. Other phones might have different ways to view app data usage.
I do have refresh rate set at every 4 hours, but I am only subscribed to 10 podcasts right now. I did get my data usage numbers by going to the app’s data usage in my phone settings as you described. For whatever reason I can’t dial in on more specific time frames with my phone, it only shows data usage in monthly billing cycles. I was lucky it just so happened to be the first day of my billing cycle so I could be exact with the numbers.
To be more specific about exactly what happened, I arrived at work, opened the app for the first time that day, listened to maybe four or five pre-downloaded episodes, and around my lunch break realized my phone provider had throttled my data speeds. That’s when I discovered the issue.
This reminds me of an issue someone reported some time ago relative to unexpectedly high storage usage. It turned out that one of the podcasts was using really huge cover photos. If you’re subscribed to one or more podcasts doing that, you could likewise have enormous data usage from mobile cover downloads. I definitely agree with @gomezz about disabling all mobile data usage in AntennaPod while troubleshooting this.
I did find a GitHub thread that was reporting a bug saying that a cover photo wouldn’t load, and the app was continually attempting to download the cover photo which lead to a few GBs mobile data usage in a very short amount of time. Nowhere near as much as what I experienced, but still a lot. There is one podcast I’m subscribed to that has never been able to load the cover photo. So that’s all what prompted me to turn off that setting. I’ve continued to not have any further issues today so hopefully I got it in one, but I’ll be sure to come back and update if anything happens. It is admittedly hard to test things when my data speeds are throttled and everything takes a few minutes to load.
OMG​:double_exclamation_mark:Too much data indeed! I’ve also noticed that it happens with AntennaPod, not like that with other podcatchers.