Controlling your data usage is essential. You don’t want to pay more than you should for an already expensive package. And in today’s tech, where pretty much everything’s connected to the internet, you can ‘waste’ a huge portion of your data without even knowing it. Ideally, you would want to set a Data limit warning on your iPhone. That makes keeping track of all those spent megabytes and gigabytes easier. Sadly, the way your iPhone allows you to control your data is not really convenient, to say the least.
Sure, you can always go to the Data section of Settings to check the consumption, but that’s pretty much it. And I’m almost certain you’ll forget to check the data usage stats one day, and you’ll go over the limit. For example, Android pushes data limit warnings to users in form of notifications.
Inconveniently, that’s not the case with iOS for some reason. Despite users’ requests, Apple still hasn’t included this feature in iOS (maybe we’ll finally see it in iOS 17). So, you’re on your own when it comes to measuring your mileage.
Now that you know you simply can’t get a notification when you’re nearing the data limit, let’s look for some alternatives that can bring the data usage before your eyes, so you don’t forget to slow down when nearing the limit.
Use Traffic Monitor to set Data limit warning on your iPhone
Since we don’t have a built-in tool to give us a data usage warning on iOS, the alternative lies in installing a third-party app. There are numerous data managers that will give you deep insight into your data usage. But do you really need all that insightful info? If you ask me, the majority of users are just interested in how much data they have left for this month. And for that purpose, a simple widget will get the job done.
That’s why my choice is the Traffic Monitor app (we have no affiliation with the developer). This app offers all you need for managing your monthly data usage. Of course, it offers deep insights into your daily and monthly internet usage, but it also includes two things that are most important to us, and these are a widget and the ability to send push notifications.
With just a little amount of work, you won’t have to worry about exceeding your limit anymore. The first thing you’ll want to do is to open the app (obviously, install it first), and go to Settings. Here you can set both Daily and Monthly cellular traffic limits. After you’ve done determining the limits, scroll down, and toggle the alerts on. You can enable both Daily and Monthly traffic alerts. And finally, choose the thresholds of when you want to receive the alert.
That’s all for setting up the alerts. Now, let’s set up a widget, so you can have the necessary info about your daily/monthly internet usage at hand.
That means you can’t insert its widget on the Home Screen or Today View like you would other widgets. Instead, you’ll have to in a container for uncool widgets from apps that haven’t been updated to work with iOS 14 yet (I’m sorry, I really don’t know how Apple officially calls this widget area, I hope it won’t make me look less credible in your eyes).
To do so, go to Today View, scroll all the way down, and tap Edit. Now, tap Customize, and find the widget called Traffic Monitor – Usage. Tap + to add it to the widgets area. This widget will now tell you how much data have you consumed during the day/month. With it, you’ll now have a data limit warning on your iPhone at a glance.
That’s about it. Do you know about some other, maybe more convenient way of getting that data usage warning on iOS? If so, please don’t hesitate to let us know in the comments below. Also, make sure to follow us on Twitter or Facebook.
Editor’s note: This article was initially published in January 2019. We made sure to revamp it for freshness and accuracy.
