Google News App Bug Is Using Up Gigabytes of Background Data Without Users' Knowledge (theverge.com)

A bug in the Google News app for Android is reportedly causing the app to use up excessive amounts of background data, leading to overage charges. "According to dozens of posts on the Google News Help Forum, users have been experiencing this issue as early as June," reports The Verge. "The issue was verified and addressed by a Google News community manager in September, stating that the company was investigating and working toward a fix, but the issue is still ongoing." From the report: Verge reader Zach Dowdle emailed in with his experience, and screenshots of his app and Wi-Fi data usage: "The Google News app is randomly using a ridiculous amount of background data without users' knowledge. The app burned through over 12 gigs of data on my phone while I slept and my Wi-Fi had disconnected. It lead to $75 in overage charges."

According to several users, the app burned through mobile data despite having "Download via Wi-Fi" turned on in the settings. In some extreme cases, the Google News app used up to 24GB of data, leading to overage charges of up to $385, users reported. So far, the only solutions seem to be disabling background data, and deleting the app altogether.

Comments

News

[Calydor]

If it downloaded 12 GB overnight, let's be generous and say in the span of 12 hours so it's 1 GB per hour, WTF was it actually downloading? There's no way text and images posted in that time span is going to add up to that much data, and just how many news videos would it take to use that much data?

Re:Just disable mobile data when not in use

[AmiMoJo]

When I was in college I had to submit a written request to increase my default allocation of 1MB of disk space so I could work on a ray tracer.

Nowadays I have lost count of how many terabytes I have in my file server. Thing is, hard drives are really cheap and it's just not worth wasting massive amounts of time sorting, compressing and discarding stuff. There was a comment on Slashdot that used the example of a photographer paying an intern minimum wage to do the job, and it turned out that just storing all the photos was cheaper.

My time is valuable. I used to waste untold hours optimizing my Amiga to boot a little quicker or save a few kilobytes of RAM, but not any more.

Same with my phone. It manages the wifi and power saving so well that I usually don't get below 70% in a day, so there just isn't any point wasting my time trying to save tiny amounts of energy by manually adjusting it constantly.