Runaway mobile data usage (4 GB in ~20 minutes)

[zawyer1]

Having installed the app about half a year ago with around 20 manually added RSS feeds of various news sites, I launched the app today after not having used it for months, which triggered a massive mobile data runaway, draining 4 GB of mobile data in just 15 minutes. At first I didn't realize why I was getting excess data usage warnings from Android, but after opening the data usage page in Settings I realized the problem. Had to immediately shut off mobile data to stop it.

Was using version 2026.04.1204 from F-Droid.

As I uninstalled the app as a safety precaution I wasn't able to catch a catlog of the problem, but it obviously has something to do with a gigantic backlog being fetched, or something to that affect. As far as I know, I had all of the automatic/background fetching options turned off.

See the attached screenshot.

[jocmp]

Hey @zawyer1, thanks for the screenshot. Can you send me the OPML of the 20 feeds here or at support@jocmp.com? I'll try and reproduce the issue from there.

Just a few other clarifying questions: do you remember if your connection was good or spotty? By manual feeds, do you mean "local?" Local as opposed to syncing with a service like FreshRSS or Miniflux.

[zawyer1]

Sadly I no longer have the feed list. Yes, they were all local feeds for various Swedish newspapers and possibly also some English news sites that I found online. I was not using FreshRSS or anything like that. Only thing I could think of was a sync loop or massive backlog being downloaded. But it very well might have been a misconfigured XML or bad feed or whatever. But the sheer scale of the data usage had me extremely worried.

It was a solid 4G connection. App seemed to be functioning completely fine; when I opened it I could see a bunch of recent news from the same day. Then as I'm reading stories I get several data warnings and an SMS from my operator warning me that I'm running out of data.

I realize this might not be the most helpful bug report. Sorry for that. For what it's worth, here's another screenshot showing it was apparently all background data.

[jocmp]

I'd need a few of the feeds to confirm, but my best guess right now is that one of them responded with media instead of a feed.

Even if each of the 20 feeds responded with 50MB of feed data, that's about 1GB of data. That on its own would be surprising, since a full-content feed of 30 items might be 300KB max.

I have a few checks in place that I'll add in the next release to mitigate duplicate refreshes and check for content type:

• Add refresh bandwidth checks #2061

[jocmp]

This is live in 2026.05.1208.