Extreme Data Usage from Google Play All Access Leaves the Service Unusable

Out of Google I/O came Google Play All Access, an unlimited streaming service almost identical to Rdio, Spotify and a handful of others. Google offered a free 30-day trial and although I’m pretty happy with Rdio, I decided to give it a try. Why not, right? At work, I stream music all day over 4G without an unlimited data plan so after a few days with Google Play All Access, I was surprised to see the dreaded text telling me that I hit my monthly data allowance.

Not wanting to get charged $15 per gigabyte overage fee, I immediately upped my allowance to 12GB. That’s right, I use a little less than 10GB a month of data and I don’t have unlimited data. Thankfully, Android has built-in reporting for data usage that breaks it down by app. I was shocked to see that Google Play All Access had used over 4.5GB in less than a weeks worth of usage. Compare that to the 3.4GB Rdio uses in an entire month.

Google, seriously, what the hell is going on here? I looked in the settings and it’s not set to stream high-quality versions, so what is the app doing besides costing me more money to use? I thought maybe I had some rare issue so I did a little searching and found that I am not alone. This review from The Droid Effect touched on the data issues as well as this thread on reddit.

I’ve reached out to Google about this issue and will update when I hear back from them.