Android Help

To recap: on 16th Feb, my phone claimed I had used 3.57GB of "mobile data" since 27th January (I have 4GB/month in contract, and set a warning on my phone at 3GB with a cap at 3.5GB) - see post 6.

According to my actual bill, I used 2.37GB 27th Jan to 26th Feb, of which 1.81GB occurred on 28th Jan (I suspect that was a day I was having trouble with my broadband, or I wanted to download something big and used the 4G for speed - I can't remember but I will see if I can find out what for my own satisfaction, possibly even a map update for my satnav). The next largest daily total was 60MB!

I hardly ever turn on the WiFi on my phone, except as a hot spot, so it's not like those figures are skewing the total even if the phone does count it as "mobile data" - which it isn't.

Today, my phone is claiming 336MB cumulative from 27th Feb, but my BT app says 99.12MB. This is a huge disparity, and it makes the data monitoring on the phone useless. I do not understand how they can be so far apart - how hard can it be?


BTW, while looking into this I found I was charged an extra 40p last month for an "out of plan text". I can understand that might have been an MMS I used to send a photo, but I have not so far found it itemised in the bill.
 
Black Hole said:
BTW, while looking into this I found I was charged an extra 40p last month for an "out of plan text". I can understand that might have been an MMS I used to send a photo, but I have not so far found it itemised in the bill.
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Found it now.
 
I'm on giffgaff and I've just checked my last few months. ~130, 50, 60, 18 (mtd) MB.
The phone agrees within a few MB; the largest discrepancy being 55 against the 60.
No help to you though, sorry.
 
Scrat said:
Bloody iPhones sometimes send texts as MMS.
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It's not just iPhones. Texts used to be limited to 160 characters, and they still are but you can now concatenate up to three texts into one message and a modern phone will stitch them back together on reception (old/basic phones still display them as individual texts). There appears to be a loss of 14 characters per concatenation.

If you go over that (or include non-text) the message can no longer be sent by SMS and is instead transmitted by MMS - which turns out to be not included in my contract.

I don't know for sure, but it could be that iPhones are particularly susceptible if you include emoji (which might get sent as images). On my Android phone, it isn't all that obvious when the character count goes over the limit - there is a small indication of remaining characters available (eg "5/1" - ie 5 characters left in one text - which only starts when you get within 10), and then it changes to 145/2 to show the message is taking 2 texts and there are 145 characters left. Once it goes over three texts (by my reckoning 452 characters), all it shows is "1k" - no obvious mention of MMS (although IIRC it does pop up a notification before it actually sends).
 
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Wallace said:
It is easy to turn off MMS messaging on an iPhone. Settings>Messages and toggle MMS Messaging to ‘Off’.

Job done.
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I can't find anything similar on my Samsung. Nothing in Settings, and if I go into the Messages app Settings >> More Settings >> Multimedia Messages, there's no mention of turning them off. There is something called Set Restrictions, with options Restricted | Warning | Free, but it is already set to Restricted and it is not clear what they do.
 
Black Hole said:
I hardly ever turn on the WiFi on my phone
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The one time I turn off wi-fi on my phone is when listening to the test cricket online while I make my way from the car park through the building (which kills DAB reception) out to my work van. All of the apps I have tried struggle to seamlessly pass off streaming between the mobile data signal and the wi-fi signal leading to annoying interruptions.
 
gomezz said:
All of the apps I have tried struggle to seamlessly pass off streaming between the mobile data signal and the wi-fi signal leading to annoying interruptions.
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I found the same thing when my iPhone switched between (fringe) 4G and 3G. This digital streaming stuff has to be able to recover from interruptions without the user being forced to intervene to restart it all the time.
 
Oh well, 5G will solve all those problems. Not!

There used to be something called iMessage(? ) on iPhones that messed up communication with standard platforms. I can't remember the details, but it used to send empty MMS messages when the user sent an email? Can anyone remember the details?
Group messages can also go as MMS.
 
I have had an iPhone since the 3Gs and never heard or experienced that. Mind you, I use iMessage less and less these days. Friends and family have ‘migrated’ to WhatsApp.
 
Whatsapp now, hardly use SMS. Why did Whatsapp crush alternatives such as Line?

Security verification codes, couriers and GP still send me SMS messages, but I never send them.
 
Scrat said:
Security verification codes, couriers and GP still send me SMS messages, but I never send them.
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Surely that depends on what your contacts use, There are so many different messaging platforms, which to choose? I go for SMS for universality, but also use email and Facebook Messenger according to applicability.

Scrat said:
There used to be something called iMessage(? ) on iPhones
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That's a standard iOS app on iPhones and iPads, and confuses me mightily if somebody tries to use it because the iPad pings but I have to hunt for why. I think it's iOS-only, so very much not universal (unlike SMS, email, and Messenger!).
 
Black Hole said:
That's a standard iOS app on iPhones and iPads, and confuses me mightily if somebody tries to use it because the iPad pings but I have to hunt for why. I think it's iOS-only, so very much not universal (unlike SMS, email, and Messenger!).
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The Messages app works on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS devices. You can send messages to any device, and the background colour of your message is blue if sending to another apple device (iMessage), but green if you send to a non-apple device (Text Message).
 
Here's a teaser (and I can't find a way to frame a google search): if somebody sends me an SMS text, if it's short enough I can read it from the notification and "mark as read" (thereby removing the unread count flag on the home screen SMS text icon). However, I also receive umpteen other notifications of SMS messages, eg from my bank, which I can read in the notification but do not have a "mark as read" button so leaving me no option than to open the message properly so it gets marked as read.

Why?
 
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