IssueTracker

International data roaming used to be a feature for relatively few business travellers with deep corporate pockets, that ordinary users would at most enable with great care for a limited time on a per-purpose basis, to avoid huge fees.

However, at least in the EU, this has changed a few months ago, since EU rules now require operators to provide free international data roaming to all customers from other EU countries that have a valid data plan at home. So, this led many ordinary users in Europe to just enable international data roaming as soon as they cross the nearest European border, and then forget about it.

The consequence, however, is that some months later you will travel outside the EU with your international data roaming still on, and as soon as your plane lands, the phone will pick up a local operator and you'll start getting big fees before you can manage to disable it. Or even, many users complained that they just took a national ferry line, without even going abroad, and as soon as they were at sea and the national networks were unreachable, their phone started using satellite data roaming and they got huge charges.

This could be avoided if Android provided you with a better, more fine-grained control over international data roaming, than just "on" or "off". You should be able to set it in the system settings on or off per each country, maybe even per each operator; or you could be provided with a simplified interface that enables or disables it by continent/group of countries. Perhaps you could have some default country groupings, with the ability to edit them in some way. Or perhaps your own operator should have a way to publish a standard configuration file describing their international roaming charge areas, so that your phone can pick it up and let you turn roaming on or off by charge area. Or Android could provide a simple interface with a few default groups of countries (for Europe, EU/EEA and non-EU/EEA would be the two groups) and then it could provide an API to developers so that someone can develop an app with more detailed control options (there used to be an app called Roaming Control that did this, but since Android 5 it does not work any more). All in all, we can debate how to do this, but please do it in some way.

Also, as a minimum, satellite data roaming should be a specific option that can be turned on or off separately from all the rest of international roaming options (or, if you implement the above interface for countries, it could just be managed as a separate "country"). This could be pretty immediate to implement, I guess.

Thanks!