Having apps run and update themselves in the background is great if you wish to be more efficient and launch apps that won’t need refreshing. However at the same time, these actions can be rather draining not just on your battery, but also on your data since everytime data needs to be fetched or pushed, data is consumed.
The good news is that with the release of Android N, Google appears to have included a feature that will help users save data. Dubbed “Data saver”, this is a feature that users can enable in quick settings via the notification shade, or alternatively enable/disable it via the Settings > Data usage menu.
So what does this do? Basically Data Saver when enabled will prevent apps from using any data in the background. However there will be a whitelist meaning that if there are some apps that you absolutely need to run in the background, like an email app for example, then you can add it to the list and it will be exempted, but otherwise all background data will be cut.
That being said, if you are using an unlimited data plan or if you are on WiFi then we suppose this feature isn’t really necessary, although we guess the upside is that it will also help save battery life. Android N is currently available as a developer preview and users who are interested can be part of its beta.