Weird Plexamp issue where it started consuming mobile data when it should not have

Plex Labs
1

This happened on Plexamp for Android v 4.11.2

My weird mobile phone plan is EXTREMELY expensive, so much so that I don’t use mobile data for anything other than text-based sites and navigation. If I touch the wrong thing on the screen, it costs me a quarter, or a buck, or more! So, I never stream content and I make heavy use of the downloads feature in Plexamp. I have of course configured everything possible in Plexamp to not use mobile data.

The other day, something weird happened and Plex started consuming mobile data. It quickly used about 200 MB and triggered an OS warning on my Android phone.

image
image660×757 40.5 KB

200 MB, you are all laughing because that’ nothing… On a normal plan! But it’s $2 on my plan and if I didn’t get a handle on it ASAP it could have cost a lot.

So, what happened? I am not 100% sure of the repro, but this is what I observed.

  • I have a number of Smart Playlists configured, and a few of these were manually downloaded to Plexamp – a few hours of content for each playlist.
  • I got into my car, with wifi still active, and started Plexamp. I noticed a number by the Downloads icon on the bottom bar, as if it was downloading tracks. While I don’t have any auto refreshing turned on, I thought maybe the app was catching up from a past refresh command – maybe I quit the app while it was downloading, you know? I didn’t think much about it.
  • I drove away, lost wifi, and quickly got a mobile data usage warning, at which point I pulled over and panic quit Plexamp, haha.

So I do not know exactly what happened, but my impression is that Plexamp began download on wifi, and when it lost wifi it switched to mobile data even though it was configured not to do that.

Here are my relevant Plexamp download settings. As you can see “complete downloads” is turned on, so maybe I did have an incomplete wifi download when the app started, and it erroneously transitioned to mobile data. That’s my best guess.

image
image687×728 78.8 KB

I also captured a log from the built in feature, if staff wants to see it.

If there is anything else I can switch on to prevent Plexamp from using mobile data I would love to know about it.

Normally I would enjoy testing this to figure out the exact repro steps myself, but tests cost dollars in my case.

Yes, my phone plan sucks in this way, it has other benefits. :person_shrugging:

2

Unfortunately neither do we, because you didn’t upload Plexamp logs :sweat:

In theory, Plexamp is very very careful about not downloading when on cellular, so we’d of course be very interested in such an issue!

3

I just PMd you the logs which I did export a few minutes after the incident. I hope they are helpful.

4

This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.