A new app-usage finding by Opera shows that on average over 30% of all data is used by apps running in the background. Facebook Messenger and Gmail are the most data-hungry apps that operate in this way, with some 73% of their total data usage happening in the background. Google Drive and WhatsApp showed more than 50% background data usage. The findings are conducted through millions of Opera Max users.
According to Opera, background data is all the internet traffic that goes on when users are not actually using an app covering activities such as email syncing, pre-fetching ads, news articles or feeds - even though a user may never read them.
To overcome the problem, Opera has introduced Smart Alerts in Opera Max which automatically identify apps that use a lot of data in the background. Opera Max then notifies users on how to manage these data-hungry apps, giving users an easy, two-tap way to block apps from using their mobile data.
Sergey Lossev, Product Manager at Opera Software
Most apps are made to give a great user experience, not to save data. If you fetch background data through your data plan, it’s like throwing away $1 out of every $3 you spend on your mobile data plan. Most people are not aware of this background data drain and may not have authorized it, nor do they know how to stop it from happening.
