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I often use my phone as hotspot on my laptop and use WhatsApp desktop application. Sometimes I leave WhatsApp on for many minutes (guesssing here; up to 2 hours).

I've recently figured out that WhatsApp consumes too much data and since I'm using my phone's data, how much it consumes matters.

I've experimented and recorded the network traffic. You can watch the video where I show this consumption.

In one instance (on the video), the app consumes ~20 MB/min while idle (not logged in), and ~33MB/min when logged in.

I was not paying attention to the rates while recording the video, so I decided to explicitly record the rates after the video.

In the second instance, it was ~10MB/min while idle, and ~14MB when logged in.

So, the app consumes 10-20 MB/min while idle, and 15-30 MB/min (idle × 1.5) when logged in.

I did not test any other IM app to compare with WhatsApp, but these rates seem like extreme to me.

Does anybody have an idea why it comsumes this much? Is there a way to prevent this? If not, I'll probably not use it when using my phone as a hotspot.

Update: This is an old question, and things got in the way and I didn't actively monitor it... What I found out later is WhatsApp application on the website is (currently) 133 MB (compressed), and it's 745 MB (uncompressed?) on my PC. When WhatsApp starts updating (Update.exe), it doesn't download the file that's on the site (133MB). Instead it downloads/updates uncompressed files and this takes 500+ MB. Whenever WhatsApp starts sucking my quota up like this, I just close the app, download and install the compressed version on the site. So doing a manual update solves the problem.

akinuri
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  • Why the downvote? – akinuri Mar 27 '18 at 10:39
  • Have you set this wireless connection to Metered? – music2myear Mar 27 '18 at 16:43
  • Not when I was testing, but I've just tested this on my pc (W10) while connected to my phone on hotspot and I've lost 15 MB within 30 seconds. So it doesn't seem to work. I'll also try it on my work computer tomorrow which has Windows 8.1 installed, but I doubt it'll work. – akinuri Mar 27 '18 at 17:16
  • Okay, this is really weird. I've tried this on my work computer and it worked. Then I turned off the metered connection, but it's still working as it's on. I mean, Whatsapp stopped consuming data. Now I can't seem to make WhatsApp consume data as it did before. Gonna fiddle with my PC again tonight. – akinuri Mar 28 '18 at 07:01
  • Probably some WhatsApp employee downvoted this, I am experiencing exactly the same thing. – Muhammad bin Yusrat Feb 01 '19 at 04:32
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    @MuhammadbinYusrat Silly WhatsApp! :) I didn't really care about this problem, even though I've found a workaround. Anyway, I'm glad you mentioned you're having the same problem. See my update. – akinuri Feb 01 '19 at 07:42

1 Answers1

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You should certainly not use the WhatsApp Web application, but rather use it in a regular webbrowser (Since the application does nothing else than displaying a webpage). Then you might use developer tools to measure the network traffic of that web application.

For example, use Firefox and open the Developer console by ctrl + shift + c. Then click the Network-tab to open the network monitor. It should list all transferred objects with their size and transfer duration. You can even sort by Size or Transferred to view what transfers have the biggest impact on your data. It shows the total amount of data transferred at the bottom, so you can make sure it's really the WhatsApp Web application that causes the high amount of traffic, and not something else. Then do your tests again, e.g. idle around in WhatsApp web or use it for some time. Maybe the issues even get fixed by using a regular browser, since it supports better caching etc.

Furthermore, keep in mind that WhatsApp Web is seemingly not a well-written web application. I often noticed it uses a lot (e.g. 200% of 400%) of my notebooks CPU while doing nothing, and nearly all of it while loading messages or contacts. So don't be surprised if it's just a bug and you can't do anything about it. For me, at least, WhatsApp Web does not do any traffic while idling, at least when logged in.

Update: In case you really need to monitor the WhatsApp Web desktop application, you might want to use some advanced tools like Wireshark to capture traffic on your network interfaces. It allows you to see all network packets going through your connection, and you can filter by lots of criteria. This might give you some insight on what WhatsApp Web Desktop really does in the background. Still, you are not able to look into SSL connections, so in that case it gets a bit trickier. But since there are no advantages of the desktop application over the web application, I'd recommend using the web application instead.

LukeLR
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  • If you've seen the video I mentioned, I, first, test the web application on Chrome. It consumes like ~400KB in a minute. The problem is with the desktop application. It seems it's doing much more than just displaying the web version. – akinuri Mar 27 '18 at 17:20
  • I'm sorry, I didn't recognize it was Chrome in the video. Didn't notice the tab bar. See the update in my answer. – LukeLR Mar 27 '18 at 17:28
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    No problem. And I'm glad you mentioned a software to monitor network traffic, because that's what I'm gonna do next. Even though I decide not to use the desktop app anymore, I still want to investigate the problem further. – akinuri Mar 27 '18 at 17:33
  • Okay, great! Feel free to update your post in case you find something out :) – LukeLR Mar 27 '18 at 18:53
  • Better late than never! :) See my update. – akinuri Feb 01 '19 at 07:47