If only this was an April fool’s joke. It looks like the Mobile One My M1 App bug causes excessive background data use. Today, I received an SMS from my telco Mobile One (M1) today that I had exceeded 100% of my mobile data allowance use.
This was rather odd as I am a rather light data user. A typical month for me see myself using an excess of 1GB of mobile data to spare. There is no reason for such excessive data use so quickly.
Excessive background data consumption
Henceforth, a quick check on my data use on my phone pointed to a shocking revelation. M1’s own “My M1” app was the top data consumer on my phone. Shockingly, it had hungrily consumed by itself over 1 gigabyte of mobile data overnight.
It will also continue to sap data during daytime standby in the background. If gone unnoticed, it could potentially go on consuming all your data until you start receiving “out of data” SMS prompters. Then it might be too late.
This was puzzling as the App is not a data-hungry app to begin with. It is used mainly to check on account details, talk time, data and SMS quotas. A quick call to M1 mobile customer helpline to disable my mobile data brought me to learn that this was a known bug with the App.
The main intent of my call too was to cut off my mobile data as soon as possible. So I do not incur any additional exorbitant data charges. This is also given the chance that the telco possibly would not honor the error or reimburse customers.
Update to the latest App
After talking to the customer service representative on the phone, the only recommended solution now from M1 is to update the app. Affected versions includes all known versions of the M1 My M1 App before the current 5.13.0 Version. This is known to affect Android versions. However, I have yet to get confirmation whether iOS is affected too. This latest 5.13.0 Version was just released today on April 2nd 2018 as I last checked on the App store.
M1 as of this evening too, has just similarly sent out notification prompters to all app users telling them to update. There is however, been no mention of the data-hungry bug to date.
M1 charges up to $10.70 extra per 1GB block of excess data on my post-paid plan. So I am hoping this was an honest mistake and not one to deliberately blow off all their customers data quotas. Lets just assume it won’t be of the latter. Moreover, I am hoping that M1 will be able to honor the issue and inconveniences you are giving to customers. Also considering that I will have no data left for the rest of the month.
No official statement yet
To date there is no official statement of how M1 is going to compensate customers for the My M1 App bug. I shall update when I get more details.
Update 6th April
After 5 working days, M1 still has no updates or acknowledgement of the issue. The App store for the My M1 app are humorously full of angry reviews of customers complaining about the issue. Some customers reportedly claiming the App using up as much as 2GB of data over a day on their phones. M1 replies to the review comments had been the least unhelpful and non-actionable. M1 is definitely not handling the situation well.
Following after another call to M1 customer service helpline, they indicated too, there is nothing much they can do now. It is recommended to let your data use overrun for this month.
Thereafter, you can refute the additional data charges with your bill by calling M1 support again the following month. This is where the extra charges should be waived on your following billing cycle.
