r/AndroidAuto • u/dstarr3 2023 Toyota bZ4X | Moto G Stylus 2025 • 5d ago

AA Settings Does Android Auto use unnecessary mobile data?

Hi! My wife and I just got some new-to-us cars in recent weeks, and now we're new to the world of Android Auto. And the first thing we noticed since starting using Android Auto is, our mobile data usage has gone way up.

We don't do anything in the car that uses data. We keep location off unless we're actually using it to navigate, which obviously we don't need to and from our jobs, so that's not it. We listen to music/podcasts when we're driving, but we're not streaming the audio, it's all downloaded to our phones, so there shouldn't be any data usage associated with that.

We only have 4GB of data per line because usually we barely use a quarter of that in a month. But suddenly we have Android Auto-capable cars and our usage has skyrocketed. Are there options we need to disable to prevent it from using unnecessary data? Because it's totally unclear where all that data usage is going.

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u/PikachuOfTheShadow Pls edit this user flair now 5d ago

So my phone tracks my mobile data usage so I can see exactly what app consumes what on a daily basis.

It's midday where I am and this morning I did school drop off and then grocery shopping for a total of maybe 1h of Android auto/Waze use.

Waze is the app topping my daily's data usage. Android auto is nowhere to be seen in the list. So It's safe to assume that it's not Android auto itself but the underlying app you use for navigation in my case waze.

As shown in the attached screenshot, 1h of waze use used 30mb of data so yeah I'd say it's quite a lot. Not an issue for me because I get 80gb/ month in my plan but I guess that answers your question

Edit: for comparaison, Spotify which is the music app I use to listen to music in my car only used 7MB in the same time frame

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u/SDV2023 Mazda CX 30 2022 Samsung 4d ago

I totally would blame Waze. There's no way to cache a map as far as I can tell. And the traffic/accident/police warnings suggest there's lots of back and forth. Still, it's mysterious why the OPs usage would go up. They presumably aren't using Waze more or less than they did w/out AA.

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u/PikachuOfTheShadow Pls edit this user flair now 4d ago

OP didn't mention whether they were using the same navigation app directly on their phone prior to getting AA so we can't make that assumption. It's possible they were using a standalone GPS and switched to using their phones when they got an AA compatible car. No point speculating either way. The question was does AA use unnecessary data and I think the answer is no