Tech tip: 3 tricks to save data and money on Android phone

Consider this: You recharge your phone on 1st of month for Rs. 100. You get 1 GB internet for a month, which you feel is sufficient for you as you do not do all that much with your phone other than WhatsApp and Facebook. One day, you wake up to see that the internet has stopped working in your phone and you can't even make a call as you don't have even a penny left in your main balance.

Reason? Even though you use just Facebook and WhatsApp, Android phone can consume a lot of data in the background. While switching off your mobile data in the night is a great idea, there are some other smarter ways to save data on your Android phone.

1. Update apps on Wi-Fi
On Android, apps have this habit of updating themselves whenever they can and whenever they find a working internet connection. That can consume a lot of data. Avoid it. And how do you do that? Force apps to update only when you are connected to a Wi-Fi network. Go to your Play Store > Settings > General > Auto update apps > Auto-update apps over Wi-Fi only.

2. Media auto download on WhatsApp etc

Tons of videos and images land up in our WhatsApp chat box every day. Now if you download all of these on a mobile data, the end result is that soon you will find your data limit exhausted. So make sure your automatic download of videos and images is disabled in the WhatsApp.

Here's how you do it. Go to settings in WhatsApp > Chats and calls > Media auto-download > disable auto-download under all three options: When using mobile data, when connected on WiFi and when roaming. This will, however, force you to download a video or image when you want to see it. But that is better than automatically downloading tens of goofy and useless videos that your long-lost classmates share in the school group. It also saves data on the phone.

In fact, the same media auto download option can be disabled in number of apps, including Twitter and Facebook. If you are concerned about the excessive data use, go to settings of these apps and disable the auto download.

3. Use Data Saver In Browser
Do you know your very own Google Chrome has the power to minimize your data usage? Yes, this widely used web browser can do a lot than just opening websites for you. You can open websites and save data.. To use the data saver in Chrome, go to Chrome Settings > Data Saver > Turn it on. With this mode Google's servers reduce the amount of data that is downloaded when you visit any webpage. However, this feature is only available on Android. Sorry iOS users!

Chrome is not the only browser that can do this. Opera Mini users can enable the video compression option in their settings and that also helps cut down data usage to a small extent.