You sound like you're very young and only joined mobile internet in the past year, but I'll bite: not long ago pretty much all mobile internet was metered, that is, you had for example a 1 GB / month rate limit, after which every 100MB would cost you additional money on your already expensive monthly subscription.
So people were careful with using mobile internet, there were stories about people who forgot to turn off mobile internet and had to pay hundreds extra, or people who used a lot of mobile internet by accident abroad, racking up bills in the thousands. Apps that had bigger downloads would often be on the arse end of complaints about high data rates, so it became a UX pattern to warn or disallow big downloads over mobile internet.
4G / higher bandwidth and government legislation (the latter notably in the EU) finally put a stop on that, only two odd years ago (if that). But, there's still plenty of countries without 4G, good internet backbones, and who still do metered connections. Even wired connections, notably in the US which seems years behind in terms of internet infrastructure in some areas.
It's still the case under some circumstances. When traveling on an international data plan in Europe, I've been burned a couple of times by a map download or a background sync operation that burned through my whole allowance--leading to another $60 or so charge. I try to remember to turn off cellular data when not actively using it when on such a plan but I sometimes forget.
It's gotten better. The plan I usually get for a couple weeks of travel gives me 1GB these days. But not that long ago it was 200MB or so.
You can argue that the user should be able to choose but any of those settings, per my example, can then be configured incorrectly by accident (or you just forget to change them).
I found it easier to just buy a prepaid SIM for travel to Europe. $25 for 12GB, 3000 minutes, 3000 texts, good for 30 days. You get a european number which is definitely handy when needing to call hotels/airlines. Sure, you are limited by the higher price of texting back home (like $0.25/text sometimes) but if you use iMessage/Whatsapp/Telegram/etc it's all included with the data you already paid for. Topping off the SIM is even cheaper with European plans or just buy a new one before next trip.
I should probably investigate it again. I don't really need that much data when I travel and the path of least resistance has always been to just get a 1 month international data plan from my usual carrier. I don't really need phone at all and text very little. But I'm sure there are cheaper alternatives out there.
Assuming you're on Android, you should be able to get the behavior you want by turning on data saver. That specifically disables background downloads, and also pauses app updates etc.
You can do similar things on iPhone--which I did after 1GB of music synced one night when in Europe. But I mostly want data to transfer over mobile when not on WiFi at home. It's just easy to forget to change the various setting when traveling.
I'm still afraid of falling asleep with a youtube video playing (autoplay) or some live stream and waking up to ~10gb of data usage. My plan is still metered after 1gb, I was under the assumption this was normal as well
> You sound like you're very young and only joined mobile internet in the past year
There's no reason to make this a personal comment.
Regarding your actual point, I've had a 100GB limit for the past 5 years (since I got an iPhone 6), with a 4G connection.
Meanwhile Google Amp has existed for less than 3 years and already has massively widespread adoption. Technological change happens so rapidly that it's rarely a technical issue when something like this exists.
GP's point that historically, people have had data cost issues, (and still do today, unfortunately) still stands, and it makes sense that they would have those switches somewhere.
Unfortunately, those switches aren't easily configured at times.
Practically I have always had all the mobile internet I could use from at least 2010 onwards. There have always been a cap but it have been way above even my somewhat heave mobile use (my current cap is 1 terabyte a month).
It would hit the cap if I was using it as my only internet but for use on my phone I dont reach it, even with occasional tethering.
I thought it still was metered on Verizon in the U.S.
A few years ago, I switched to T-Mobile partly motivated by their unlimited plan, which felt like some kind of luxury.
(And, of course, "unlimited" is a lie. Downloading my ~200 GB music library through a hotspot, and I got throttled and charged extra per GB over some cap.)
Windows 10 has some really nice built in features for managing your connections— you can flag a particular connection as being metred, and it will monitor it for you, offer to block apps from using it, avoid downloading through Windows Update over it, etc.
But you can't throttle your network adapter except in unworkably coarse-grained increments, which is ridiculous. It's trivial to set it to whatever speed you want in Linux. :c
So people were careful with using mobile internet, there were stories about people who forgot to turn off mobile internet and had to pay hundreds extra, or people who used a lot of mobile internet by accident abroad, racking up bills in the thousands. Apps that had bigger downloads would often be on the arse end of complaints about high data rates, so it became a UX pattern to warn or disallow big downloads over mobile internet.
4G / higher bandwidth and government legislation (the latter notably in the EU) finally put a stop on that, only two odd years ago (if that). But, there's still plenty of countries without 4G, good internet backbones, and who still do metered connections. Even wired connections, notably in the US which seems years behind in terms of internet infrastructure in some areas.