Bloody Iphone bill for £224!! Apps running in background apparently!!

[MadameCastafiore]

Luckily provider said I had 'Bill Shock' and has scrapped the extra charges - guy on phone who talked me through hyperventilating at the size of the bloody bill said I should install an Ap Killer but I can;t find one of these and now am terrified of using bloody phone for fear of running up hundreds of pounds worth of bill!

o what the hell is free and what isn;t - home - apparently free, if I am at a hotel and they have free wifi - does that mean it is free??

AM really really confused!

HELP PLEASE

p.s. do you look at videos or something on it? or download music? do you know anyone else who has access to your phone?

No look ast houses and do download music and sync to icloud but did that when at home.

Think maybe I should go into the Orange shop at the weekend and ask what is goign on and how mcuh download stuff I have.

You have all been a great help and hopefully this won't happen again or I am going to sling the bloody thing out of the window!

Ignore all the stuff about data roaming, that's not the issue if you weren't overseas (and apologies for coming to the conclusion that you were).

So something very odd is going on here. Yes do go and have a chat with Orange and find out what your limits actually are. But if you're being careful and only downloading stuff like music when you're at home and that little fan icon thing is lit up then it's a bit of a mystery how you could possibly use up so much data. Did you perhaps listen to radio over the internet?

Is there an Orange app? I'm on Vodafone and they have an app that tells you your usage.

Can an iPhone set up a Wireless Hotspot? I do that sometimes, it enables a Wifi-enabled device to use your phone's mobile interweb access (for example if you have a large and unused monthly allowance).

If you accidentally did that without setting a secure password, other wifi users would use your access.

The figure you quote suggests extremely large data transfers. I've never hit that, and I download apps, system updates, large email attachments. If somebody downloaded something shady like a video viewer from an adult site, it might be redirecting or doing something undesirable.

I'll also add that apps running in the background on iOS devices are very very limited in terms of what they can do. They can't just sit there using up your data allowance, with a few exceptions. Those exceptions tend to be apps that either play streaming music (so you can listen to music while doing something else) and apps that do voice calls over the internet (e.g. Skype, so that you can handle calls when not in the app).

So unless you're listening to a lot of internet radio or using some sort of internet phone function then there really shouldn't be anything running in the background that's capable of chewing up your data.

No way that an app could run up that sort of bill.

I have had bills like that when abroad but never gone over my data limit.

What data limit do you have? I think most providers offer 1GB as standard, and I have never gone over mine.

Speak to Orange and ask for an itemised bill.

You need to look at your location services and switch some off. This is a known problem with the new update (I think) on iphones. DH just had a text from O2 two days ago that told him he was about to go over his data allowance which had only started on 11th Nov. He has NEVER gone over it in 3 years and we always use wifi at home (he WAH so not even out much). He called O2 and they insisted it was just his usage etc, etc, then when he insisted on speaking to a manager he got put through to their iphone specialist who said it was a location services issue, told him which ones to turn off and he hasn't had a problem since. His data allowance has been credited back to him.

O2 have had to reset masses of peoples data allowance and if you google the problem you will see it is a widespread issue. DH spoke to Apple who said they were working on the problem but they considered it to be your contract providers problem not theirs. O2 said it was Apples problem. Of course, it just ends up being the phone owners problem.

Just checked his usage and it was 1.8Mb yesterday. Previously it was 420Mb in 4 days (no downlaoding of movies/music or anything like that). Just usual usage including looking at internet a bit.

hope that helps

I'd heard the location thing was causing battery to drain faster. As far as I know, the latest update solves this problem.

Can you just turn location services off? Just got an iphone 3gs 2 weeks ago, battery is draining sooo quickly.

It was the Setting Time Zone Location Services that was draining the battery, I turned mine off a couple of weeks ago. I have free text & web on my p&g if I top up £15 a month, it seems to be unlimited, so I don't know if it would have been clocking up charges too if I'd been on a contract. If I turn it back on, it pops up with a purple arrow that shows it's currently using my location, so I keep it off, unless you travel a lot you only need it when the clocks change

To turn it off, go to Settings and click on Location Services - all the apps that use Location Services will be listed with an On/Off switch next to them. You can turn any of them off if you want to and only turn them back on if the app doesn't work properly without it or if you need to use that function.

The Time Zone one is in the System Sevices section- scroll down to the bottom and touch System services - you can then turn off Setting Tome Zone (I have also turned off Location based iAds)

MmeLindor - I have the latest update (ios version 5.0.1), I don't know whether it's meant to stop the Time Zone service constantly using Location Sevices, or to turn it off after a set time or what, but if I turn Location Sevices back on for Time Zone, I get the purple indicator at once. Maybe it will turn it off after a while if I left it, but I can't really be bothered to experiment, I don't need it to be on anyway.

Bookmarking this as I'm paranoid about going over my web allowance! (iphone)

Actually I have just looked at my cellular data usage on my iPad, which still had the Time Zone setting turned on, and my total usage sent is 625 MB and received is 2.5 Gb. Unless it reset itself when the iOS 5 was installed, that would be for the whole life of the iPad, which is almost 18 months. Of course, the TimeZone wouldn't be using cellular data while I was on wifi, but I do have my iPad on 3G quite a lot, including a whole week while our home phone line was down recently. So I'd say it doesn't look as if it's using much data anyway,