Bear with me on this one

My mum has one of these chinese tablets ..

https://www.amazon.ca/Ampe-A80-Table.../dp/B00I47F8MG

and, for the large part, it's fine. I managed to root it as soon as i got it, so I could use Titanium Backup to strip it down of a lot of the stock chinese apps and other stuff that I knew she wouldn't use, and also to free up a lot of space as well.

I used it for a couple of weeks myself just to be absolutely sure that deleting any of these apps wasn't going to cause any problems and it didn't so I gave it to her and let her get on with it.

Now the part that's unexplainable is that, according to her itemised usage on the sim card, every night at exactly 12 midnight, there's some kind of "event" that causes a good chunk of data usage - in this case, it's been 200mb in 2 days with two 100mb "events" at midnight each night since I put a new sim card into the tablet.

Now before anyone thinks it's something my mum is doing, it's not .

I've gone through every app and setting i can find and think of to try and pinpoint what is happening but i've got no idea. The only thing that makes any kind of sense is that there's something embedded in the version of android that basically "phones home" which wouldn't be the first time for a chinese tablet or phone i suppose.

If anyone has any suggestions or bright ideas, i'd be most grateful.

I had something similar on my Android phone. I have an app on my phone that shows what apps are downloading data, how much and importantly for this exactly when they are doing it.

In my case it turned out to be the Google Play and Amazon apps. No idea what exactly they were doing or why they suddenly decided after many years to start doing it. You can do something similar with the built in Data Usage app found under Settings, though not sure if you can find out when an app was downloading but can certainly see which apps are eating up all the data.

Anyway if you tap on the apps concerned you get a number of settings, one of which is to "Restrict background data". It basically stops the app downloading data in the background unless it's on WiFi.

Hopefully that tablet has a similar set of settings to play with.

I didn't actually know that - thanks. It's probably not so much of an issue at the moment as the sim she's got has got has a 4gb data allowance, but it was still happening when she had the old sim in it with a 1gb allowance so it was always eating in to that all the time.

I did initially think she was sitting up in bed using it, but when i looked at the times it was literally 00:00:00pm every night and i realised that it would be impossible for her to get that exact time every night of the week

I assume she does not have wifi then?

For real analysis, you could get a system log app such as Catlog and record logs from just before midnight for a few minutes and then examine the entries at 00:00:00. That'll nail the culprit and you can then investigate the app/process in question and potentially freeze/uninstall it using TB.

No Wifi, no. It's a 3G enabled tablet. I'll have a look at catlog as well, thanks.

If you just want to identify what app is downloading all this data you can do it with the native Android stuff, you don't need any additional apps really. Unless you want to go all CSI on the thing

In the evening just before shutting down for the night go into Settings and Data Usage and check for an option Reset Data Usage. This sets the day of the month when the system resets the data usage. Set that to the day of the month you do this, eg 10 for today.

Then when the apps do their thing when you check in the morning it should be easy to spot those apps that have spiked in usage. You could even try setting the day to the day after (eg 11 if you did it this evening) but it depends exactly when it zeros the usage count, might do it after the downloads which would kind of defeat the object but if it does it first then that makes it even easier to spot the culprit.

Another good idea - thanks.

It's a bit difficult to get my hands on the tablet at the moment as my mum is in kent and i'm in essex, but i'll keep all this in mind when I next get hold of it.

(The tablet, not my mum...)