Back in the day when Twitter first surfaced, it was all about posting short text messages. The message length of 140 characters was more than enough for people to start blogging about their lives. Then more and more things were added to the simple messages. At this point, you can add any video or rich content to your tweets including animations. By default these videos start playing as you check your twitter time line. This default behavior is not only annoying but it can also lead into the complete waste of the expensive mobile data that you paid for.
In order to configure the Twitter app in Android for saving the internet bandwidth, you can follow these steps:
- Launch the Twitter app in Android and tap on the user profile icon. You must be logged in using your Twitter credentials.
- From the menu that shows up, choose Settings and privacy.
- On the settings screen, choose Data usage. This section contains all the options that you can use to control how much data is being used by the Twitter app.
- On the next screen, choose Never for both the Video auto-play and High quality video. Similarly, uncheck the option for image previews in the timeline.
- After making changes in the Twitter options, you can close these screens and go back to using Twitter as usual. If Twitter keeps showing the image preview and keeps playing the video automatically then you may have to restart the Android device.
From now on Twitter will not display image previews, will not automatically play videos on your Twitter timeline and will not load high quality video. By using these options, you can save the internet bandwidth by as much as 70%. This is very useful when you are on your mobile network data like 4G/LTE and still want to be able to use the Twitter social networking.