“Use Cellular Data For” Switch Doesn’t Work
You can also enable or disable cellular data for certain iOS apps and features from this setting.
Choose Settings > Cellular to view the cellular data usage for each app. Tap to turn off cellular data for an app.
Unfortunately, this feature seems to have stopped working with iOS 7.1.2. I went over my 200 MB bandwidth limit in both July and August—having never done so before. Apps such as OmniFocus and Overcast, which I’ve always set to not use cellular data, used tens of MB of data each month.
Omni seems to have received other reports of this problem and explained how I could turn off automatic syncing in OmniFocus. I think this helped, but the app has still used 5 MB of data in the last four days, when it shouldn’t have used any at all.
Update (2014-09-18): My initial impression is that iOS 8 fixes this bug, although it continually pops up alerts telling me that cellular data is turned off.
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John Gordon: “matches our family and friends experiences”
The feature is still working correctly for me, on 7.1.2. Tested with YouTube, Facebook, and Overcast. Also, Overcast has its own setting on the Downloads screen for whether or not to use cellular data, which worked as advertised for me just now.
@Tyler I’ve always had both the system setting and the in-app setting off for Overcast, yet it’s still using lots of data for me.
[…] late in the iOS 12 cycle, but with iOS 12.3.1 I’m seeing a resurgence of an old bug from the iOS 7 days. Specifically, iOS is letting apps such as OmniFocus and Overcast use cellular data, even though I […]
What has regularly happened to me is that the download starts on WiFi. Then when I walk out of the door, the download continues over cellular.
Especially for podcasts, this is a problem because these can be big downloads.
Unfortunately, I gave up and had to resort to manually switching cellular data on/off.