Manage your data usage in iOS when travelling — 12 Jul 2019

We’re off to South East Asia later this month, and depending on the country, the roaming charges are expensive, even if you purchase a data bundle before hand. It turns out that Thailand is part of Swisscom’s World 1, but Cambodia is part of World 2, a more expensive group of countries.

Short of turning data roaming off all together, there isn’t a simple way of monitoring your data use abroad. I wish there was something akin to TripMode for the Mac on iOS… so I maintain a list of checks to perform before leaving :

• Check Data roaming (add data package or not)
• Turn off mail push fetch new data and set to manually
• Check Background updates
• Change to automatic carrier settings Mobile Data > Mobile Network
• Check WiFi VPN
• Turn iTunes auto updates mobile data off
• Turn Photo Mobile Data updates off
• Turn Mail mobile data off
• Turn Maps mobile data off
• Turn Music mobile data off
• Turn Video mobile data off
• Turn Books mobile data off
• Turn Podcast mobile data off
• Turn Safari Reading List data off
• Limit Background App Refresh to Wi-Fi only
• Check the list of app allowed to use mobile data
• Turn off iCloud Drive data off (bottom of list)
• Turn Wi-Fi Assist off
• Check how apps use Location Services
• Review Notifications

It reduced significantly my data usage without turning it off completely.