Stop Sonoma from consuming your mobile data downloading wallpapers

I subscribe to 150GB of mobile data monthly, an astronomical amount for my daily use, but the last 2 months has been pretty harrowing as all 150GB depleted. I narrow this down to enormous amounts of data being used when I tether my Macbook, and eventually traced the data usage using Activity Monitor to idleassetd which is the process downloading wallpapers.

As a fan of dynamic wallpapers, especially since I also use Bing wallpapers for Windows, I didn’t think that it would consume copious amount of mobile data. Turns out i was wrong, as each wallpaper goes from 300MB to 800MB in size, and the OS will download it till you have no disk space left, with no option to only sync when over Wi-Fi (not tether) which is the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen any Product Manager decided to do.

After trying every other remedy on the Internet, so far this works best for me, but be warn you will be reset back to the default Sonoma wallpaper only.

1. Go to /Library/Application Support/com.apple.idleassetsd
   • If you’re unfamiliar, try Finder > Go > Go To Folder and type it in
   • Here lie both the database for the wallpaper and in the subfolders the actual wallpapers .MOV files
2. Backup or delete the wallpaper database
   • Delete Aerial.sqlite, Aerial-sqlite-shm, Aerial.sqlite-wal
   • If you’re worried, you can make a copy of these 3 files elsewhere first. Should anything go wrong or if you want to revert back, you have them.
3. Create 3 folders of the same name to block the automated process from recreating the databases
   • Create the folders Aerial.sqlite, Aerial-sqlite-shm, Aerial.sqlite-wal exactly where the 3 files used to be
4. Next, nuke the files
   • Go to Customer subfolder to look for the wallpapers. For me they are under 4KSDR240FPS.
   • Delete (and empty trash) the wallpapers. This should reclaim a lot of disk space, which was critical for me as I only have 128GB on my HDD
   • In multiple forums, it’s stated that these files don’t get “counted” into disk space left, but it wasn’t in my case, i took back 20GB. YMMV.
5. Finally, kill / restart the wallpaper processes
   • Start Activity Monitor
   • Search for wallpaper
   • Quit all of them. They will immediately reappear as they get restarted.

You can never fully get rid of it, as Sonoma will again download the default wallpaper (approx 600MB, and I don’t know where it is), but that will be your only dynamic wallpaper moving forward. You can still switch to other types of wallpaper such as still pictures or nothing.

May the Apple PM who made this repent for his or her sins.