SGS2 data roaming auto activation (bug?)

Can you try, also, uncheck "Use packet data"?

If it works, help spread this trick.

I have the exact same Problem on my SGS2.

I'm currently on vacation abroad, and about a week ago my traffic monitor displayed 20 EUR worth of  GSM traffic -- and sure enough, data roaming was activated. Thinking I may have activated it by error, I just deactivated it and let it be.

Lo and behold, a week later I wake up to see that during the night, 70 EUR worth of data were downloaded via GSM (weather, RSS etc all saw the open connection and generated traffic). Knowing that it wasn't my fault, I frantically checked my operator's website, and they do provide a "disable data roaming" option on the network. But it's a kill switch I don't like (on rare occasions, I do need roaming), and it may only be changed once during a 24hr period.

I went even further and deactivated both "Data roaming" and "Use packet data" in "Mobile network settings", for the heck of it.

That was yesterday. No traffic was generated since then -- obviously, because I disabled it via my operator. But when I checked the "Mobile network settings" today, both "Use packet data" and "Data roaming" were activated again!!


I first assumed it must have been an app I installed, but could not yet find out which one. I will try to reproduce this with your methods (rebooting, lost signal).


On a side note, are there any official Samsung contacts on this forum? I found some other (minor) bugs, some of which were even reported over the Google Code project, but they aren't being addressed there usually because "they don't deal with device-specific issues".

Chris

I can confirm that this is caused by (at least) the Software Update feature ("Settings -> About phone -> Software update -> Check for update). Everytime I run it and Wi-Fi is connected, "Data roaming" becomes activated.

I suspected Software Update because you mentioned rebooting, because I noticed some time ago that every reboot the phone uses it to check for updates. I cannot reliably reproduce this though, only when Wi-Fi is also connected.

I can 100% reproduce (and confirm via logs) that when "Check for updates" is run and a Wi-Fi connection exists, it will activate data roaming:

1. Make sure you're connected to Wi-Fi
2. Make sure "Data roaming" is disabled
3. Execute "Check for update"
4. Go to "Data roaming" again and see it's enabled

I also executed the above with Catlog running in background, and thereby verified that data roaming is being enabled.

The following is me manually enabling/disabling data roaming via the Settings menu:

Notice how it reacts to a click, and sets the value of the data_roaming setting to either 0 or 1.

Now, with Catlog running in background, when I start Software Update, I noticed to my horror the following:

Notice how some debugging service actually enables roaming.

I have attached the output of Catlog, filtered for strings containing "roam" (case-insensitive). You can see that I manually disabled, enabled and disabled roaming (this was a marker for the log, to see if it produced useful information), and later on an automatic setting by Software Update. The log contains Exceptions, but AFAICT that's normal for Android...

Can anyone please try to reproduce this? I'd especially welcome tests by both roaming users (currently traveling) and non-roaming users, to see if active roaming is a condition for this error.


Austria, with Orange as regular operator and AT&T as roaming operator here in Florida (where I'm on vacation).

Hello everyone,

I'm just coming back from the UK and yeah, the bug happened again. Chrisk, you were right, your way to reproduce the bug is working everytime. I was connected to a wi-fi, data roaming was unchecked, and when I tried "check for updates" it became checked, automatically. I reproduced that a couple of times.

So I guess this is a bug ! But we still don't know if it happens to everyone or if it's only with some devices / soft versions / operators.

Thanks to all for your upcoming feedbacks !