[tjohns]

Foreground prefetching aside, there are controls that let users disable background data prefetching/syncing. In fact, it's even one of the buttons on the standard "power control" widget.

While the screen is definitely a huge power drain, it's easily controlled by the user. Poorly behaved apps will drain battery regardless of what the user does, and definitely _can_ be a huge drain. These used to be a lot more common when Android first came out -- many of these apps got better when users got better visibility of battery usage and started complaining to app developers.

And in general, we're talking kilobytes of data here. Not megabytes. Prefetching is good for metadata and text content; image content and other large assets should be an opt-in feature. (Android's "News and Weather" app was a good example of how to do this right.)

[DougWebb]

That control, like the permissions approval dialog, is a blunt tool. Sure, I can turn background data completely off, or I can let my apps run wild with it. There's no middle ground and no per-app control (unless the app developer provides one.)

KB of data could be reasonable, depending on how often its being fetched. But the OA specifically mentioned retrieving several MB of data for use "during the next few minutes." If that's an app that doing some kind of news feed to an always-running widget, and it's grabbing images and stories in case I might want to read them, it can really add up.