Back in June, Apple had the WWDC (Worldwide Developers Conference) to unveil to the world all their updated software. They showed all these new updates to macOS, tvOS, and watchOS. All these updates showed great progress in keeping up with performance and stability, but then came the moment of truth Apple’s biggest money maker. The curtains came down and they unveiled our 10th version of iOS, our update of a software that changed the way we look at our connected life.

This unveiling is where we all got a little confused with the turn iOS was taking. For people that don't know when the iPhone was made it was hardware and software made to work together simply. This means that your phone is supposed to be as easy as you need it to be without being distracting. But when it was unveiled all I saw was an OS that’s starting to become hard to use.

In messages, they now have a message app store for when you want to want to download stickers, apps, and games. These are all being done through the app and now we have yet another app that is going to take space if you aren't looking at it. I know to most people who know how to use their phone well, what they will see from the ad Apple has out is new shiny things to do, but this was not the point of iMessage. When iMessage came out, it was a way to connect all iPhone user through a single service that worked. The whole purpose to was make sure it was a clean messaging service that would not use a lot of data and connect people around the world no matter the carrier as long as they had an iPhone. Now I know we are moving forward, but this single design principle is the most important it’s the reason why the iPhone is loved by so many of us.

As of right now in the developer portal, we are on our 4th beta. These little changes in the way messages behave has become data dangerous. Every iMessage sent has doubled in size, but the main problem is the iMessages that have a special effect or GIF attached to them, those messages are averaging to around 2-6mb every time one is sent or received to your phone. So, let’s say your data plan only gives you 2gb of data, that’s nice when your messages only used 0.37mb of data a month, you could send thousands a month and not think about it. Now that same data plan won't get far if your friend keeps sending you animated iMessages. On the low end, if you send 100 messages to your friend every week that would be would be 200mb. If you did this for 4 weeks, it would come out to a whopping 800mb. If you are on the higher 6mb all the time in one week it’s 600mb after four weeks it’s 2.4gb worth of data, well now you are over your data plan just by using the new features in iMessage. The picture shown is after just 2 days of using it!

I want to hope that Apple will change this as a lot of people don’t have much data on their plan, but as of right now it’s the way Apple wants it to be and we will just have to figure it out. So my message to you guys is just be careful with your data usage once you update to iOS 10 in September. Make sure not to go over your data.