After installing the app, a message appeared on my phone saying there were 83 weeks of data to synchronise. How much data is involved in this process? I don't want to exceed the data limit for my phone.

Also, 14 peers appear to be connected. While the app remains open in the background, how much data does connecting to peers require over time?

A comment against the app in the Play store says:

During the last 4 weeks, Bitcoin Wallet has consumed 166 MB of my data plan, 160 MB of which was running in the background. I am pretty sure that I had once set it to only transfer data in background when Wifi is on and it had been running smoothly like that for about 1 year. For now, I turned of "Sync on Power" and I hope this helps for now. But I think you should re-introduce the "background sync only on wifi" setting.

That gives some idea of the quantities of data, but it doesn't split it into what's required for the initial synch and the ongoing connection, so my question still applies.


Since January 14 on my Galaxy Nexus, Bitcoin Wallet for Android has used 120 bytes of mobile data. It's used approximately 160 MB of data on WiFi in the same period. One month cycle earlier, it used 463 KB of mobile data, and approximately 113 MB on WiFi. I plug it in every night and whenever I'm in my car.

I can't answer for the amount of data necessary for the initial synchronization, other than advise you to do it on WiFi for both speed and data limit reasons.

  • What tool or utility did you use to measure this? – technology_is_overrated Feb 24 '13 at 2:38
  • Android 4.0+ has a data counter built-in. – Colin Dean Feb 24 '13 at 3:01

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