How to prevent WhatsApp from eating up your data plan
I remember a few months ago when my father, who was used to working from home only using Wi-Fi, finally acquired a new data plan. About ten days after he started his plan, he called me to say: "I was trying to send you a video that I made of the cat and I couldn't, it won't let me send it".
My father, like many people, uses his cell phone almost exclusively to check his mail, watch videos on YouTube, and talk and send files through WhatsApp. This is not bad, because each individual has different needs. His, it seems, is to watch and share videos. But those videos can devour your data before you know it.
The problem is that many times we don't pay attention to the amount of data we consume when playing streaming videos or downloading media sent to us via WhatsApp because we are so accustomed to relying on the benefits of Wi-Fi.
Follow these steps to save your data while using WhatsApp
- Open WhatsApp.
- Touch the 'three dots' on the top right hand side
- Select Settings
- Touch the fourth option, Data and storage usage
- Select the third option, When using mobile data
- Deactivate the four options (Photos, Audio, Videos and Documents) and press OK
- Scroll down to Low data usage and check the box on the right side
- What we have done here is to disable the automatic downloading of any file type (Photos, Audio, Videos and Documents) when we are using mobile data. This will prevent these files from being downloaded with your data plan, so they will wait for you to connect to a Wi-Fi network in order to do so
In addition, we reduce the use of mobile data during calls we make through WhatsApp. This will allow you to save data, but it will also mean that the call quality could suffer a little.
Have you ever used up all your data plan without realizing? What other ways do you have to prevent this from happening?
