Recently I was able to install a new application on macOS that monitors network traffic. Useful for limiting bandwidth usage on the data bundle of your mobile device when travelling, you can limit all or a subset of your apps. It’s neat.

A few months ago I was using my mobile data on my laptop to watch a webcast, but I noticed that the mobile provider’s network usage graph was climbing much higher than expected. It didn’t match the size of the webcast video I was watching, and I had closed down all unnecessary applications.

After installing this tool today, I noticed that newsd, namely the daemon behind the Apple News application, was using hundreds of megabytes a minute at one point, such that it could quite easily blast through any data cap in a day.

So please take care, fellow macOS users. newsd is probably is sucking down a lot more data than it needs to, especially if you’re on a News+ subscription.

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