Pushbullet is an Internet service that allows you to sync your phone’s notifications to your desktop computer (and even to other mobile devices), send SMS messages from your desktop, and share links/text/images from one device to another. It has been one of my favorite apps.

I’ve been using Pushbullet for months, but now I noticed something and have to say that I’m concerned about the amount of cellular data this app uses on my phone. Here is the screenshot from my app:

Pushbullet App Configuration

And here’s the main app:

Pushbullet Main App

As you can see, there’s nothing extraordinary going on there. I started having concerns when I (accidentally) went into data usage for Pushbullet to see what caused the system warning… and I was surprised to find that Pushbullet was in the first place in terms of data usage, with a whopping 51 MB of data in just 15 days! That’s crazy, right?! Apps don’t waste that much data nowadays…

My reaction, more or less

Here’s the screenshot from the cellular usage panel:

Cellular usage

Wi-Fi usage is even worse:

Wi-Fi usage

Next steps

I’ve written an email to their team to see what’s going on. Being an engineer myself, I could easily sniff out what data it’s transmitting (and where), but I’ll wait the official explanation from the developers…

Synchronizing a few lines of text across 3 devices I use shouldn’t accumulate to around 220 MB of data. Something is fishy here, and if I don’t get any updates soon, I’ll post the sniffed data at a later date.

Best of luck with investigations!