To first prevent your smartphone from consuming data from the internet when you are not using it, limit or remove background tasks from your applications; when they send you regular notifications, for example, or constantly carry out updates. Social media apps, in particular, are very bandwidth-hungry, even in the background.
Whether you use iOS or Android, go to the settings of your OS, section “data usage” or “cellular data”, in order to restrict the rights of all or part of your applications. Android notably offers a “data saver”, which “prevents certain applications from sending or receiving data in the background”. Basically, it is the same principle intended to save you from too much web addiction: delete notifications, as well as the frequency of synchronization of its messaging and updates. The best Unifi Fibre Plan is right here for you.
To avoid consuming your mobile data, also avoid watching your streaming videos in 720p or 1080p, and prefer low definition. Whether on YouTube or Netflix, it is possible to change the quality of the image and bring it down to 240p or 144p, by going to the options and settings. Reading comfort will obviously be less, but this is the price to pay to avoid exhausting your 4G plan. The principle is the same for music listened to on Deezer or Spotify, which makes it possible to reduce the sound quality.
Or data compression
You can also take advantage of apps that offer offline use. Netflix, Spotify, Google Maps, and many other services now offer offline modes that keep mobile data usage as low as possible. Some apps, like Pocket, also allow you to save pages, videos, and music and view them later without being logged in.
Final Words
Finally, don’t hesitate to use a data compressor. Some browsers, such as Apache and Opera, are thus equipped with a “compression” function. The concept: when you want to open a web page, it is first opened in a cloud service, then compressed before being sent to you. Your browser then decompresses the data and displays the page, all within a very short time. A system that thus makes it possible to download web pages previously compressed, and therefore much less heavy and greedy in data.