Smartphones and mobile apps have become more data hungry while data packages are not currently cheap. Google did introduce the data usage tracking featuring in the Android user interface and for many it is comprehensive enough, but how about tracking your data in real-time or on a daily basis when you are on the move? It’s not really possible to open the Settings App to check how much data was consumed on a particular trip.
Thankfully there is no dearth of decent data tracking applications in the Google Play Store. There are few apps with a fancy look and a good set of features, while some are very basic. Take a look at the top five Mobile Data monitoring and tracking applications for Android devices.
Onavo Count
This is one of the most popular data tracking apps that existed even before Data Usage was implemented in the Android operating system. Onavo Count brings an impressive user interface to help you save money by keeping an active check on data consumption.
This app will offer your alerts and warnings when you cross or are about to reach the predefined data limits. Indeed one can set data usage limits at any time and let the app track usage.
Onavo Count can even give an overview of the individual apps consuming data. Keep a track and also predict whether you are close to hitting the pre-defined usage limit. This app allows you to restrict data hungry apps and force them to be active over WiFi networks. A fantastic user interface and nice set of features makes this a very important mobile data tracking app.
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My Data Manager
The simple app meant for those who seek only options and are not much into the looks of an app. It is easy to setup, and the app starts monitoring all the apps to highlight the ones consuming a lot of data.
The app also tracks the run times of the other apps along with the amount of data consumed, presented in graphics. The only drawback of this app is that one has to keep it on the phone storage for it acts sporadic if moved to the SD card storage. It shows clear consumption of data on the cellular connection and WiFi network.
Users can always set their data usage limits and the app gives an alarm whenever closing in to that limit.
Traffic Monitor
Traffic Monitor is an app that combines data monitoring, consistency measurement and a Task Manager in one single package. The app offers a data traffic counter for cellular and wireless network usage with clear bifurcation of uploads and downloads.
There is also a quality of service measure (ping duration test) built-in to give you a fair idea about the strength of the available data network services. Set your daily, weekly or monthly usage limits to check a summary of the traffic at regular times. You can check traffic statistics per app for the said period and even for the previous month. The built-in task manager lets the user kill the data hungry apps and check the memory usage by each app. Get battery level status, signal strength, GPS status and more information from the app available for free from the Google Play Store.
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Dodol Phone
This app has a clean interface. It lets the user keep track of the data and analyse it in real time. Apart from the network data, this app also tracks call and message traffic from the smartphone. Dodol is capable of providing a comprehensive usage report on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. Like several other apps, user can set their custom limit for the data usage threshold.
The best part is that this app has been optimized for full HD devices and also supports 4G LTE network. The app presents usage data in both numerical and bar graph format so that the user can analyse data consumption.
NetCounter
No fancy user interface, no mind-boggling features. That’s what the NetCounter is like. It is the most native appearing simple data tracking app. It shows clearly classified consumption of data over the cellular and WiFi networks. 
The user can select the time range as daily, weekly or monthly. Best of all, users can customize the plan’s cycle date. No other data is consumed but this gives a break out in numbers because at the end of the month, that’s what matters most. Check out the NetCounter app from the Google Play Store.