Recently, I have been eager to get the data saver on Android to work automatically for me. My goal is to have Tasker automatically enable the built-in data saver when my data is low. Before I came up with this idea, I have search the web to see if there is any solutions exist already so I don’t have to reinventing the wheel. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find anything on this topic so I have to create my own solution. Upon 1 week of testing, things to work as I expected so I decided to share in this article how I did it.

Prerequisite An rooted Android phone – Unfortunately, the solution I came up with only works on rooted Android phone, I’m running Android 9.0. A way to get to know you current data usage – Some carriers allow you to get you data usage through SMS, some might only allow you to use USSD to get data usage. I am only covering the case of using SMS here (my case). How-to The data saver in Android is basically something that limits all the background data usage. After some digging on the Internet, I found that you can turn the data saver on with the following command cmd netpolicy set restrict-background true (requires root). Then it is pretty easy to have the data saver turned on automatically when the data is low. My way of doing this is as follows:

Set a global variable as threshold for triggering the data saver. Send an SMS to my carrier every morning at 8 AM, parsing the SMS to get my remaining data. If my data remaining is lower than the threshold then turn on the data saver whenever mobile data is in use. This is done by using the run shell action and run the command mentioned above. Turn data saver off automatically when I am connected to WiFi (Not necessary but add it just in case). It is quite easy to do this when you carrier allows you to query data usage using SMS, with USSD however, things is not that easy and unfortunately, I haven’t figure out a way yet.