It is a familiar frustration for Nigerian smartphone users: a subscriber buys a large data bundle on Monday, and by Wednesday afternoon the phone displays the startling message, “Dear Customer, you have 500MB left,” followed in quick succession by the 200MB and 50MB warnings. The experience is widespread enough that accusations of “data stealing” routinely follow, with subscribers blaming network operators and demanding answers, especially on social media.

TechNext24, which has reported on these claims for some time, took a different route this round in the interest of transparency: a verifiable, personal audit to establish exactly where its data was going. Every action was documented over two days and compared with the smartphone’s built-in app data usage report. Those daily figures were then set against the automated SMS usage reports from two providers, MTN and Airtel.

The exercise uncovered a complex web of hidden background services, network overhead costs, and an invisible consumption gap that every Nigerian user pays for.

The Setup

To keep the calculations and records rigorous and fair, the test was structured around two different networks and two different devices. Both carriers rank among Nigeria’s largest mobile network operators, so how they meter and report usage touches a substantial share of the country’s smartphone users.

Device one was a Tecno Spark Go 2023, an Android 13 Go Edition smartphone — Google’s lightweight Android variant for entry-level hardware — with 3GB of RAM, carrying an Airtel 4G SIM subscribed to a weekly 4GB plan at ₦1,500.

Device two was a Tecno Pop 9, which runs full Android 14 with 4GB of RAM. As a more modern operating system, it handles app management slightly differently than Android 13. This phone housed an MTN 4G SIM on a weekly 3.5GB plan, also priced at ₦1,500.

It was understood from the outset that device specifications, internet speed, and above all operating system optimisation (Android 13 versus Android 14) would influence background usage. The mission, however, was to measure consumption by comparing the reports of the phones’ internal app trackers with those of the network providers.

Day 1 Tracking: The YouTube Download Test

The first day was devoted to a high-volume data task. Three specific YouTube videos were downloaded on both devices, with the reviewer waiting until the app finalised the downloads to confirm the total file size. By calculation, the three video files totalled 813 MB.

The automated day-one SMS reports showed Airtel logging 868.65 MB of usage, while MTN logged 852.79 MB. Both networks charged more than the video file size, with Airtel billing significantly higher.

The network figures were then compared with what the phones’ internal app usage settings reported. The Spark Go’s tracker on the Airtel line reported that YouTube used only 797 MB, yet the Airtel network billed 868.65 MB — a discrepancy of 71.65 MB, or roughly 9% of the video size, disappearing on the Airtel network.

MTN’s Pop 9 tracker reported YouTube usage of 835 MB, against a billed 852.79 MB. That difference was far smaller at 17.79 MB, or about 2%.

This produced the biggest finding of day one: the Android 14 MTN device was better at reporting actual app data usage, because the Airtel Android 13 device underreported the download size. The 9% gap on Airtel is precisely where the average user grows frustrated and complains about data depletion.

Day 2 Tracking: The Play Store Download Test

Day two called for a different kind of app behaviour and a data option that can be specifically monitored in the phone’s app usage settings. Three different applications were downloaded from the Google Play Store on both devices.

The three apps had a combined size of 169.57 MB. The data logs and phone app trackers confirmed that both phones registered 175 MB of usage — suggesting that about 5.43 MB of background data services, such as syncing, notifications and location checks, ran silently during the app downloads. That outcome was considered reasonably fair.

The networks’ automated SMS reports for the following day told a different story: Airtel reported 185.44 MB, while MTN’s report came to 190.38 MB.

The problem, once again, lay in the network billing. Airtel’s figure of 185.44 MB was 10.44 MB higher than the phones’ local tracking, a 6% gap. MTN’s report of 190.88 MB was 15.88 MB higher than the local tracking, a 9% gap.

Drains of these small percentages, accrued over time, are likely to make a subscriber’s data “vanish” long before the week is over. Across monthly or yearly subscriptions, they can mean a large portion of the plan — potentially running into gigabytes — going missing.

Why Is Data Vanishing?

After analysing two full days of logs, the audit found no evidence of direct data theft by MTN or Airtel. The operators did not simply take 500 MB at random when no one was looking. However, every discrepancy traced back to an actual data usage or download session.

The personal findings also revealed several factors that explain why data vanishes faster than a phone tracker suggests.

The single biggest contributor to the perception of theft is network overhead. A download is not a straightforward process. When an 813 MB YouTube file is downloaded, the device must communicate back and forth with Google’s servers and retransmit data that was dropped during a network disruption. The network bills for all traffic that passes through its towers, not just the exact file size. This overhead tax typically accounts for an extra 5% to 10% of consumption that users are hardly ever aware of.

Every modern smartphone also runs background processes continuously. Android syncs background data for push notifications, and this hidden consumption ran between 5 MB and 10 MB per download session in the test — a figure that might be higher on another device.

The data further showed a discrepancy between what the device measured and what the network actually billed, and this is where user trust is destroyed. According to the tests, the network billing gap can sometimes hit as high as 9% in extra consumption, and there is no transparent report that shows or explains the additional usage.

The entire conversation ultimately boils down to a trust deficit. To assuage it, the review concluded, network providers owe subscribers a detailed breakdown of data consumption, perhaps on a monthly basis. Until such breakdowns become standard, the audit’s method offers subscribers a version of the same check: comparing the phone’s built-in data usage report with the operator’s automated SMS alerts, while keeping in mind that day one showed a device’s own tracker can also underreport actual consumption by several percentage points.

Related reporting: telecoms experts have framed rapid mobile data depletion complaints as a symptom of a trust deficit.

This article is based on original reporting by TechNext24: “I tracked my data consumption for 48 hours, and measured against Airtel and MTN’s reports; here is what I found”.