Google News App Bug Is Using Up Gigabytes of Background Data Without Users' Knowledge (theverge.com) 110
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.
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.
App? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why do you need an app. I have one app on my phone - it's called a browser. It can go to any of the sites I need. The last thing I need to do is download piles of identical WebView wrappers for websites when a single browser app does 99% of what I need.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I want my phone to download news overnight, so I can grab my phone in the morning and read news offline in the subway. A website is not able to do that. Or maybe now they can, using service workers and push notifications? Is this the point you're making?
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Cool story, gramps. Make sure to secure your onions so they don't fall off your belt while your shaking your fist at cloud.
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Cool story, gramps. Make sure to secure your onions so they don't fall off your belt while your shaking your fist at cloud.
No problem junior. Enjoy paying that $385 overage charge on that shiny new $1,000 iphone for that news app you had to have. When you're done, bitch a little to your friends about how all the boomers who don't throw away their money ruined your future.
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I have one app on my phone - it's called a browser. It can go to any of the sites I need.
Oh god. You browse the internet on your mobile phone? Why would you do that to yourself? Do you actively enjoy full page adverts, buggy rendering, slow pages, broken UIs, and mangled content?
If you're into that thing I'm sure there's some BDSM apps out there for you, but you may need to download another app store since that kind of self-punishment is against Google's guidelines.
Is it just me... (Score:2)
...or does everyone hate the new Google News app as much as I do.
I used to use the 'News and Weather' app that came with the phone until recently, when that app went blank except for a notice that it was being replaced by Google News. So I switched. The two apps are pretty much the same thing, but there's something overly busy and overcrowded about Google News.
The old app just gave you lists of stories in various categories, and that was it. A little scrolling, and you had a sense of what was there, and
Re: Is it just me... (Score:3)
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Why use an app for weather? I type the first 3 letters of my city into Google and the "my city weather" suggestion pops up. Click on that and I get an in-Google summary of weather for the next 10 days. Why go anywhere else?
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Sometimes apps are faster than web sites. :(
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The last thing I need to do is download piles of identical WebView wrappers for websites
Perhaps you don't need or want any of them, but there are plenty of apps that are much more than that.
Missing option (Score:1)
Or getting a lawyer.
I had this happen to me a while back. Remember that update that used to fail and retry continuously? I had mobile data turned off globally and it still used it. I suspect there's a backdoor "just for testing" that all the devs are all told not to use in actual shipping code but there's always one who doesn't listen.
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Get a lawyer for $75 to a couple hundred bucks? You'll probably be laughed out of most lawyer's offices with such a tiny claim.
This is why all cell service should be unlimited. (Score:1)
The sad thing is that 24 GB isn't even a lot of data. Averaged over a month, that would barely even be faster than dialup speeds. Can you imagine paying $385 a month for a month of dialup Internet service? That's crazy. Yet people end up with these sorts of crazy bills every time an app misbehaves, or an OS bug appears, or some jerk goes crazy with push notifications, or whatever.
Every time I see a story like this, it reminds me how badly the United States needs to have consumer protection laws governi
Re: This is why all cell service should be unlimit (Score:2)
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Well, if I only cared about one aspect of a country and life, I'd definitely move there.
News (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
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I remember that...
int jesus_factor = 15;
with a counter for a dodgy process that might retry infinite times
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It could simply be downloading the same text snippet over and over again. Something as simple as a incorrect timestamp could cause that.
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Video news isn't much better. Would be nice to have a phone-wide setting to disable any video download unless explicitly clicked on to view it, or unless an app is given explicit video downloading permissions.
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I had a similar issue with a weather app. Pulled 7GB of data, exceeding the mobile data cap by 6GB. Presumably it just screwed up and downloaded the same stuff over and over, hammering the poor server that is used to just sending out a few hundred bytes to each client.
It was one of the apps that came with the phone (not mine), so I took it back to the shop and explained what happened. In the end they cancelled the data charges and reset the usage to zero for that month, but insisted on taking the phone back
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This is an app choice in this case. Certain apps will allow you to chose how they behave, in case you don't want to force all apps to behave in a certain way. There are different os level choices but I would see google news allowing accessing the news you just clicked on without wifi even if you checked the option to pre-cache all news through wifi only..
Re: (Score:2)
WTF was it actually downloading?
When a mobile app uses that much data you know fully well that it isn't downloading any meaningful comment. Have you never seen a bug where a program gets stuck in a loop requesting the same data over and over again? It doesn't matter what that data is providing it is requested ALL the time. Hell I've had open source software do that (alerted to it by an email addressed to "root" that a HDD was full). Windows Update has done that in the past too. My media centre did that too trying to get the weather, and t
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Given that it's a rare household that doesn't have WiFi these days, why on earth would you leave it to download this over your mobile data?
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If the phone loses connection to the router for one reason or another, falls back to cellular, and then is stuck downloading so it doesn't appear 'free' to switch back to wifi?
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One way this can happen is through repeated failure.
You try to transfer something, the transfer nearly completes but then fails for some reason. When you re-try it it fails again for the same reason. If you don't have a mechanism to limit the number of retries or implement exponential backoff then you can cause data traffic many times the size of the data you are trying and failing to transfer.
I had this happen with email once, the sender was using nullmailer and trying to send mails that were over the reci
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One used to be able to swipe away stories already viewed or not cared about. That seems to have changed in the last few months.
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Google: The AI that is selecting stories is now so good that there is no need to swipe away stories.
Microsoft: QA of Windows patches is now so good that updates can be forced in Windows 10.
Deleting the App? (Score:1)
I wish I could delete the useless google apps on my phone, but I think you'll find that deleting the app altogether is usually not an option at all.
This happened to me (Score:5, Informative)
It costs me a bit north of $100, and my connectivity was cut off by the mobile provider at a really bad time. Ouch.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
If your subscription has overage charges, I would recommend setting a data limit on your phone. Both Android and iOS have supported a hard cutoff since basically forever.
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If they honour it as much as the "Download via Wi-Fi" option, what's the point?
Who is "they"? The OS puts a had block on your cell data just fine. The problem was a bug in an app. This is not a question of honour.
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Some providers let you cut off access the moment you hit the limit. Well worth enabling. In the mean time did you send the bill to Google?
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Some providers let you cut off access the moment you hit the limit. Well worth enabling. In the mean time did you send the bill to Google?
Google will ask why you didn't set your Android phone with a data cap, something that has been a feature of the OS for the past 10 years. Who cares about providers.
Eternal Beta (Score:1)
Google is really good at delivering buggy software. I often have Google Play Services drain my battery, for example, and Google does not seem interested in addressing this issue. This happens when you roll out Beta software into the real world.
Don't worry! (Score:2)
Just disable mobile data when not in use (Score:5, Insightful)
I frequently cleanup and delete stuff I do not foresee needing (after taking multiple backups to offline media of course), I always turn off mobile data when I am connected to wifi or when I will not require it, I even turn off wifi on my phones and tablets when not in use to save the battery, such as at night or when driving.
Such habits allow my devices to run for longer without a recharge when out and about plus it seems, have saved me countless well earned £££ by not becoming one of the people impacted by this software bug and others we may not know about.
Unfortunately today, most people would not even dream of turning off data when not actively using it, as they may miss a Facebook post of their mate making a cuppa.
When I attended college, 100MB (not Gigabytes, Megabytes) of storage served me perfectly well for 3 years as I had gotten used to formatting my digital photos and scans to acceptable quality and filesizes due to having grown up with 1.44MB 3.5 inch floppy disks.
By the time I worked in the IT department at the same college 4 years later, students would arrive at the support department door in an endless stream on day 1 of their course, complaining that they have run out of space, having only saved 1 digital photo (why did their tutors not educate them on file size reduction? Don't get me started on the state of teaching!). Often they and their tutors demanded 100GB of storage space so they could save their photos and scans, which were to be used in Microsoft Word documents and presented on printed page at the size of a postage stamp, even though the saved file size would if laid out flat could easily be seen from space.
What I am getting at here is that having grown up in the age of 'digital rationing', I had to learn how to manage my storage space/bandwidth cost effectively and with the end product in mind.
Nowadays, people feel they don't have to bother, most probably don't even know that they can reduce the size of a photo taken by their digital camera or post process it in the GIMP or whatever to reduce the physical and file size. After all, they have a huge hard drive and cloud storage.
Learning how to manage the space/bandwidth as effectively as they would a physical filing cabinet, would go a long way to reducing the risk they are exposed to from such Google bugs.
Re:Just disable mobile data when not in use (Score:5, Insightful)
This is also why programmers should be forced to use slow machines with insufficient resources.... so their code isnt more bloatware!
Re: (Score:2)
I always turn off mobile data when not specifically using it, but more because that saves battery and effectively blocks ads from all my apps that don't have a legit need for internet.
Re:Just disable mobile data when not in use (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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That is a fine attitude to have; if you don't have limitations. However there are A LOT of people in settings where they don't have access to data that isn't metered. I am not saying products should be tailored to our use case by any means but minimally workable solutions should be offered.
I (kinda of) agree treating local storage as "mostly free" makes sense in the PC world on phones not so much. Why does Apple think they can charge 150 extra for the 256GB model than the 64GB variety? When a high speed
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However there are A LOT of people in settings where they don't have access to data that isn't metered. I am not saying products should be tailored to our use case by any means but minimally workable solutions should be offered.
Workable solutions do exist. There are android apps that don't use lots of disk space, and there's ways to manage data to ensure you don't go over carrier limits baked right into the OS.
I bought tax cut last year (boxed). Guess what nothing in there but a download link and license key. WTF?
I had someone give me a CD with software on it recently. My home computer doesn't have a 5.25" drive bay let alone a CD player. My laptop doesn't either. I had to see the IT department at work to make it readable. This is not such an extreme example in 2018. The point is that nowadays this truly does start bordering on the a
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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.
The problem is not waste, it's the proportion of waste vs resources available. 1GB is nothing for a PC, but it's worth a bunch of money on mobile.
But, hey, go ahead and keep thinking that resources are infinite and everyone has as much money as you do to keep buying hardware that's "really cheap".
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Or if you're not on the spectrum you could just set a data limit in the Android OS and call it a day.
My life is busy enough without micromanaging every little detail of it.
Hey, no big deal. (Score:3)
oh wait
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That's the killer thing. This was discontinued...
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I'll just keep using Google News & Weather, which is better anyway.
oh wait
THIS. I came here to basically say this. I used it until a few weeks ago when it's data source was forcibly retired. I tried the new app, hated it, told google so (I'm sure they took notice!), and removed it.
I'm now using other, non-Google apps for news. RSS readers are great! (Although I'm sure they're tracking me anyway.)
Solution (Score:1)
Don't turn off wifi at night. Why do that anyway? It doesn't conserve that much battery.
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If it's downloading gigabytes per night, I think you'll find it does use significant battery.
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If it's downloading gigabytes per night, I think you'll find it does use significant battery.
If your goals are to reduce battery consumption and avoid unauthorized overnight data consumption, there's always Airplane mode. Or just plain turning the phone off. I've found that both approaches are quite effective. Of course, there's always a chance that you'll miss someone's Facebook post complaining about how much data their phone is gobbling.
Only USD$75? (Score:5, Funny)
Be happy you don't live in Canada, where 12GB over your regular quota would mean losing your house.
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what if you blew it early on for a download you wanted ? I'm lucky enough to be provided a large enough cap that I never reach it, but my wife only uses a 1 GB plan. She sometimes use it all, and then she`ll be one or two days without. Extra GB are 70$ (twice the plan price which includes unlimited text / unlimited international calls) so it`s not a good idea to unlock it for more..
Providers must be happy! (Score:1)
It's the providers that are certainly happy! With their stupid package of 5 to 15 minutes of internet per month... because this is the reality!
They offer high speed internet that are busted after few minutes at full speed... there is no chance to anyone to be able to detect this bug without busting.
About par for the course (Score:1)
Google Play Services will similarly update bits and pieces via LTE when all updating mechanisms are disabled and set for Wifi only. I've caught Instant Apps resources to be the biggest offender.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
If only we could make Google great again. They suck pretty hard now.