I have a cellular data contract which offers me a very small amount of data every month. Going over this data limit causes me to automatically be charged for an extra gigabyte, which I want to avoid.
On Android phones it is possible to set a data cap which prevents you from using a certain amount of data. So, for example, you can set the limit at 100 MB and your cellular data will turn off once you reach that limit.
I have noticed a significant amount of “system services” data usage on my iPhone (which Apple does not allow you to control or disable all), which is why I am afraid I will inadvertently shoot over the data limit by accident.
I am aware that there are third party applications which have widgets showing you your data usage, but this is not what I’m looking for.
One possibility is getting notifications when you’ve reached some limit, such as 100 MB. While not ideal, this helps in controlling data usage. However, my experience with the app I tried, My Data Manager, was quite lousy: it alerted me of my limit at the end of the day, long after I had, without realizing, spent 1 GB of LTE data.
Another possibility is using a burner Android phone, putting the SIM card in it, creating a personal hotspot and using that with my iPhone. The Android phone would have the data limit instead of the iPhone. However, this is obviously a silly idea in practice.
So does iOS have a similar feature, either on vanilla iOS, a third-party app (e.g. through an automatically VPN), or some other app which makes monitoring this data passively easier (like the ones mentioned above)? Or is it the assumption by Apple that all iPhone users have unlimited data plans?