How much data does Facebook messenger use

Facebook Messenger, a Facebook product, was one of the earliest chatting apps on social media and was dedicated only to Facebook users.

Over the years, the app has undergone developments making it available to everyone even without a Facebook account and is a standalone application that doesn’t require the Facebook app to run. It’s supported on both Android and iOS devices and can be used not only for chatting, but it can also be used to make both audio and video calls to a selected number of countries around the world. The app comes with so many features including gaming, AI chatbots, AR effects, and many others.

Facebook Messenger uses around 20MB per hour on average when making calls. This depends on your internet speeds, video quality, and the type of content that you’re sharing across. 

Facebook Messenger does a lot of things. You can send a text, make a voice call, play a game, make a video call and you can even add a 3D augmented reality to your photos and videos. All these require data. When you open Facebook Messenger, it consumes about a megabyte of your data and between 10 – 20KB when you open and read a message. For a video message, it consumes approximately 1 – 5MB. Now, when it comes to a conversation like a voice call, it uses 20-30KB per conversation which isn’t much.

For video calls, however, it’s another thing. Live videos in the form of video calls use more data because the network has to maintain a steady transmission of information between you and the other person on the call. This is to ensure that there are no lags and the time between you talking and the other person receiving the information in real-time and without distortion. According to several Messenger users, a video call on Facebook Messenger consumes around 400MB for a 45 – 60 minute call. When your network is fast, the app adjusts your consumption and might consume around 15MB per minute. When calculated per hour, it’ll use about 4.5GB.

In general, the amount of data consumed will depend on the internet speeds and video quality where a better internet connection will consume more data, unlike a slower internet that automatically adjusts the video quality to a lower one. Since Messenger contains pictures and videos, it also downloads and saves them on your phone either when you’ve opened it or in the background. This too contributes to more data usage. Despite all this, it’s worth noting that Messenger compresses all your videos and images to save on bandwidth and texts don’t consume a lot of data.

All these figures are estimates, and the only sure way to know how much data Facebook Messenger uses on your phone is to check and find out.

How to check Facebook Messenger’s data consumption

On an Android phone, open the Settings app and select ‘Network & Internet’. On the next screen, select ‘Data Usage’ to view the data consumption of all the apps. Now to see only for Facebook Messenger, tap on ‘View Details’ and then scroll to the Facebook Messenger app and you should be able to see how much data the app has used for a certain duration.

For iPhone users, tap on the Settings icon and select the Cellular option. This might vary on some models with some saying Mobile Data or Cellular Data. On the next screen, scroll down to the Cellular Data/Use Data For section. You should be able to see data consumption for each app including Facebook Messenger.

Messenger has a Data Saver feature that it introduced some years back which you can take advantage of and save your cellular data. It allows you to manually download images and videos instead of automatically doing so. This goes a long way in saving your data. You can also restrict background data for the app preventing running when not in use. When the app runs in the background, you get chat notifications which consume data. However, the best way to save your data is by using Wi-Fi.

FAQs

Why does Messenger use a lot of data?

You can send/receive photos and videos besides chatting and voice calling. This uses a lot of data due to the size of the content shared. Also, when making video calls, the app will consume more data to sustain the stream.

Does Messenger Lite perform the same way Messenger does?

Yes, despite Lite being smaller in size, you can still accomplish what you can on Messenger.