Onavo: The Conclusion to My AT&T Data Issues

As a follow up to my little ongoing saga about my data usage on my iPhone -- I blew my 200MB cap last month -- I thought I would tell you a little bit about [Onvao[(http://www.onavo.com/), or, the app that has since kept me from blowing through the cap again.

Onavo is a little app that installs a profile on your phone. Kind of in the same way that TestFlight works. You can see your profiles, by the way, if you were to go to Settings -> General -> Profiles -- although you probably won't have any if you don't remember specifically installing one. I honestly am no expert on iPhone profiles, but essentially, they are custom setting configurations. Businesses often use them to, say, disable the camera. It doesn't seem very Apple-like, I know, and it's almost a little scary. But you can always remove any profile by simply deleting it from the settings. The phone will then revert to its previous settings. Nothing malicious can really happen with profiles though. All they really are is just a bunch of custom settings.

Now, the profile that Onavo installs slightly alters the way data comes into your iPhone. Instead of it going directly from AT&T's towers to your phone, the data is first pushed to Onavo's severs, shrunk down and optimized for the iPhone, and then pushed to your phone. It works in much the same way the old Opera browser did, if you remember that at all. By doing this, Onavo claims to be able to reduce your data consumption by up to 80% a month. Nuts right?

Well, it's not quite as much as that. But in practice, my Onavo app does claim to have saved me upwards of 15MB in the past few weeks alone. It also depends on how you consume your data. It seems to be the most efficient with Safari, while the least sufficient with apps like TweetBot and Reeder. Guess it's just the way it works...

But I know what you're thinking. Doesn't this all slow the iPhone data speeds down significantly? Well, the answer is actually a surprising and resounding no. I have noticed absolutely no difference since using Onavo to shrink my data usage.

The only difference I did notice was that I didn't go over my 200MB cap this past month, and am well on track to be fine again this month as well. I can't tell you why since iOS 5 I seem to be consuming more data. I ran a ton of tests. Thought it was everything from iMessages to location services. But it was not. There was no way I could see of fixing it.

Until a good friend of mine recommended Onavo during a video chat I had with him.

Should Onavo be necessary? No, not at all.

But until the day comes when I stop being so cheap and decide to shell out the extra $10 a month for data that I don't honestly need, I don't mind having an extra profile/app on my iPhone. And it may turn out, should you find yourself with a 200MB data cap like mine, that you don't mind either.