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The last four days, I have been wondering why my phone (Motorola Moto G 4G) was overheating, and burning through its battery at a stupefying pace.

So it turns out that the cause of this problem was the Stack Exchange app, particularly when not on WiFi.

Some data:

  • Instead of the usual 50% or so battery use for screen usage, it now lists "mobile standby" as the most energy-consuming functionality, with about 20%. Let it be noted that my phone is without WiFi for about two hours a day. Pretty heavy network load.
  • Next, looking at my data usage, it is not too hard to identify the problematic app: Stack Exchange managed to burn through a whopping 100MB - in a single day. For the past week, it lists 6MB as front-end use. Thus, at least 94MB was burnt by the SE app in the background in a single day.

This data usage statistic is absolutely ludicrous and I would like to see a fix as soon as possible (I have disabled SE app in the mean time). Naturally, it may be that it is due to something I or my phone did.

Please advise on known issues and workarounds ( tag might need to be removed in this case).

Some things I recall doing with my phone over the last week that might be relevant:

  • Trying to load a deleted comment from my feed;
  • Disabling Cloud Print and Google Newsstand built-in apps.

Version: Android 4.4.4, SE 1.0.57.

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    As another data point, my phone has measured data usage for the app at less than 0.01 GB over the past week. It is on the cell network 14 hours a day, local WiFi the other 10. Data Usage
    – Andy
    Mar 16, 2015 at 23:09
  • Hmm. I've had strangely short battery life recently, and indeed "cell standby" has used ~15% of my total battery life. But the SE app has only used 3.56mb background data this month, so... O_o
    – Doorknob
    Mar 17, 2015 at 3:47
  • Well this is interesting... I'm looking at your requests to the API from the app and only seeing a few page loads (some questions on meta.math), in fact, there's only been 37 calls from your device to our servers in the last 12 hours. I'm honestly not seeing what could be causing the data usage. Can you try uninstalling the application, installing it again, then letting me know ASAP if it uses lots data in the background again?
    – Kasra Rahjerdi
    Mar 17, 2015 at 14:56

1 Answer 1

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Looking into this, not seeing any obvious signs on what's going on.

In the last 12 hours, we received 37 API requests from your account, none of them seem problematic. Perhaps it's to due with images being loaded or something? Approximately what time or day did you notice the data spike? We can do more fine grained looks at our logs if we know exactly when to look for.

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  • Thanks for looking into this. I have done as you suggested and reinstalled the app. The biggest spike occurred on March 16, but I noticed the problems a few days earlier (but only found SE as the cause on the 16th). I will let you know if it recurs. Meta.math doesn't really have many pictures, and I would expect those on the foreground, too... It remains a mystery :(.
    – Lord_Farin
    Mar 18, 2015 at 12:03
  • Based on the limited data since my last comment, it seems that the problem does not recur (yay! :)). If you cannot find anything strange on the 16th either, please tag this status-norepro; I will then accept this answer and we will blame an unspecified glitch somewhere in the chain.
    – Lord_Farin
    Mar 18, 2015 at 19:21

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