So, I'm reasonably informed on networking but Apple devices are a bit of a black art to me because I have always favoured Windows and Android.

Recently on holiday and I set myself up with a local SIM and 900MB of data for $20, which I thought would be ample for the week.  Until, that is, I allowed my son to connect his laptop to my android mobile hotspot.  I had taken the precaution of disabling system and app updates on the iPad, but it still slurped data at about 1MByte per second (quite a good 4G network in Raro now).  I'd burned through 200MB in a few minutes before I realised what was happening and killed the hotspot.

So, short of going into every app or feature and turning off background data use, is there any equivalent in iOS to Windows' and Android's "metered connection"?  The Googling I've done up to now indicates not, but GZers may know better.  I assume the culprit was probably something like photo cloud sync, but it would be a whole lot easier to do this at the connection level .