As if iOS 6 didn't have enough of a black mark on its from the whole Apple Maps debacle, it turns out the extra data consumption you may be seeing can also be blamed on the update.
The Next Web is reporting that a bug in the AV Foundation framework of iOS 6 is apparently to blame for an increase in data usage from podcasts and other audio streams played over a cellular connection. The good news is, it's fixed with the latest iOS 6.0.1 update.
The issue was discovered by Public Radio Exchange after This American Life noticed a higher than normal spike in data around the time iOS 6 and a new version of Apple's Podcasts app were released.
"Because the ranges of these requests seem to overlap and the requests themselves each carry some overhead, this causes a single download of an MP3 to use significantly more bandwidth than in iOS 5," PRX explained. "In one case, the playback of a single 30MB episode caused the transfer of over 100MB of data."
That's a particularly troubling issue for users in this day and age of capped data plans, particularly with iOS users now so reliant on services such as iTunes Match, Pandora and Spotify for their music playback.
Although there are scattered reports that the issue continues to exist in iOS 6.0.1, PRX has data to the contrary. If you haven't yet updated to iOS 6.0.1 and continue to stream music or other audio content to your device, now might be a great time to install the update and see if it cuts down your own data usage.
Follow this article’s author, J.R. Bookwalter on Twitter
(Image courtesy of The Next Web)
