Guide
Setting up Data Monitor
Written for Data Monitor: Simple Net-Meter on Android 6.0 and later. Menus move between releases and between manufacturer skins, so treat the names below as descriptions rather than exact paths.
On this page
1. Before you start
Data Monitor needs Android 6.0 or later. Some of the analysis screens rely on statistics that older Android releases simply do not expose, which is why the requirement is what it is — on an older phone parts of the app would show empty tables rather than wrong ones.
Install it from the Google Play listing. There is no account to create, nothing to activate and no file to download from anywhere else. On first launch Android will ask you to approve permissions; the app cannot attribute traffic to individual apps, or scan for Wi‑Fi networks, until you do. Each request and the reason behind it is set out in the permissions table.
Some manufacturers — the aggressive battery managers are the usual suspects — will stop background apps after a while. If you want the meter to survive, allow Data Monitor to run in the background in your phone’s battery settings. That setting lives in Android, not in the app, and no app can grant it to itself.
2. Entering your data plan
This is the step people skip, and then wonder why the percentages look meaningless. Two numbers do the work:
- Quota — the mobile data allowance in your plan, for example 5 GB. Enter the mobile allowance only; Wi‑Fi is counted separately and is not usually metered.
- Billing cycle start day — the day of the month your allowance resets. For most carriers this is not the 1st. It is on your bill, and getting it wrong shifts every percentage in the app.
With both set, the data usage screen shows the amount consumed in the current cycle, the date range it covers, and the share of the quota that represents. That percentage is the number worth glancing at, because it only means something next to how far through the month you are.
If your plan has separate allowances — a general bucket plus something zero-rated, say — enter the general one. The app counts bytes as Android reports them and has no way to know which of them your carrier decided not to charge for.
3. Turning on the status-bar meter
In the app’s settings, under Network traffic, there are three things to set:
- Network meter — the master switch. On, and a live throughput figure appears in the status bar and in the notification shade.
- Priority — how insistently Android should place the notification. A higher priority keeps the readout visible in the status bar; a lower one lets Android push it down the shade or hide the icon. If the meter keeps vanishing from the status bar, this is the setting to raise.
- Notification type — how much detail the notification carries. The simple style is a single throughput figure; the other styles break it into download and upload. Recent versions of the app added a type that shows the two directions separately.
Android itself decides how much of a notification fits in the status bar, and the rules differ by version and manufacturer. If the icon is not where you expect, check the app’s notification settings in Android system settings as well as the app’s own.
4. Reading the daily history
The history screen is a table with one row per day. The columns are the date, the Wi‑Fi total, the mobile total and the share of the monthly quota that day used. The header shows the range currently in view and the totals for it.
Two habits make it useful:
- Read the mobile column, not the total. A 1.4 GB day on Wi‑Fi is usually irrelevant; 200 MB on mobile may not be.
- Look for the outlier, not the trend. Ordinary use is fairly flat. When a bill is unexpectedly large, it is nearly always one or two days that did it, and those rows are visible at a glance.
Days with no recorded transfer show a dash rather than a zero, which is a useful distinction: it means nothing was counted, not that nothing happened.
5. Finding the app behind a spike
Tap a day in the history and the app opens a per-app list for that date: every app that transferred anything, each with its own Wi‑Fi and mobile figures, with the day’s totals at the top. Sorting by the mobile column puts the expensive one first.
A few things worth knowing before you blame an app:
- Entries such as System, Android System and the Play services component cover work done on behalf of other apps — app updates and system sync, mostly. Traffic landing there is normal.
- Automatic backup and photo sync are the usual cause of a large one-off day. They are typically configurable to run on Wi‑Fi only, in the app that owns them.
- Streaming quality settings are the usual cause of a steady, repeated cost.
Data Monitor will not change any of those for you — it has no power to restrict another app’s traffic. What it does is point at the right settings screen to go and fix.
6. Connections, ping and Wi-Fi scan
Three diagnostic tools sit alongside the usage screens.
The connection list shows the network connections currently open on the device: remote address and state, roughly what a desktop network utility would show you. It is a snapshot of what the phone is talking to at that moment, which is occasionally illuminating and occasionally just noisy.
The ping watcher is a list you add hosts to — a domain name or an IP address on your own network. The app pings each and shows the round trip time and whether the host answered at all. Useful for the everyday question “is it my phone, my router, or the site?”: if your router answers in single-digit milliseconds and an outside host times out, the problem is past your front door.
The Wi-Fi scanner lists the wireless networks currently visible to the phone. Android requires location permission for this, for every app without exception, which is the main reason a data monitor asks for it at all.
7. Widgets and the paid modules
The Google Play listing carries an In-app purchases badge, priced by Play at $2.99–$4.49 per item, and the developer describes the paid part as “Widgets, selected modules”. In other words home-screen widgets and certain modules are the premium part; the meter and the usage analysis are not.
These are one-off purchases rather than a subscription, and they are handled by Google Play like any other in-app purchase — which also means refunds and purchase history go through Play, not through this website. If you are not sure what a given item unlocks, the purchase screen inside the app is the authoritative description; prices there are in your own currency and are the ones that count.
8. When the numbers look wrong
The history is empty, or stops at a certain date
The app can only read statistics Android keeps. If permissions were declined, or granted late, there is nothing recorded for the period before. Check the permission prompts first, then give it a day of ordinary use before concluding it is broken. Android also ages out old statistics on its own schedule, so very old days may simply no longer exist to read.
The meter disappears after a reboot or after a while
Almost always the phone’s battery optimisation deciding a background app is expendable. Allow the app to run in the background, and exclude it from any aggressive power-saving mode your manufacturer added. Raising the notification priority in the app helps it stay visible in the status bar, but it will not survive being killed outright.
The figures do not match my carrier
They will not match exactly, and this is expected rather than a bug. The app counts what Android counted; the carrier counts at its own end, on its own cycle, with its own rounding, and may not charge for some traffic at all. Use the app to find which day and which app, and the carrier’s own figure for how much you owe. There is a fuller explanation in the FAQ.
Battery use looks high
A live meter has to stay awake, and Android attributes that time to the app that asked for it. If the cost bothers you, turn the status-bar meter off: the daily and per-app history keep working, because they are read from statistics Android maintains anyway.
The percentage looks wrong on a specific day of the month
Check the billing cycle start day. If it is set to the 1st and your carrier resets on the 18th, every figure will be right and every percentage will be misleading.
9. Turning it off or removing it
To stop the readout without uninstalling, switch off the network meter in settings; the history carries on being recorded by Android regardless. To remove the app, uninstall it the ordinary way — press and hold the icon, or use Android’s app list. Its stored settings go with it. Purchases made through Google Play stay attached to your Play account and are restored if you reinstall.
Still stuck?
The FAQ covers the questions that come up most often. Anything else goes to the developer contact address published on the Play listing — and include the phone model, the Android version and the app version, because the answer usually depends on all three.