[tomxor]

I find Apple devices are the worst for disrespecting network use when they "sleep", my partner has a couple and as soon they think no one's looking they saturate the network downloading updates and "syncing" shit. It doesn't help that they started using massive undelta'd partition images to distribute minor updates to their OSs.

They also keep changing stuff on each update to make it harder to force the things to disconnect in sleep mode without a lot of fiddling.. so I've resorted to just adding them to a MAC based access control on the router which we toggle on when we want to use the internet for anything that needs more reliability or bandwidth. I also first tried an aluminium foil based Faraday cage/box to chuck them in with some degree of success but the foil can get breaky.

[MarkSweep]

You maybe be able to reduce this by turning off “background app refresh”.

[tomxor]

Maybe, but trying it on the device it's a constant battle, next update it will be something else.. Blocking it's access externally is reliable.