Opening up a bill and noticing that the total amount is two or three times the expected amount is never a good thing. Most bills are predictable to a certain degree but a cellular phone bill can often be completely different than what you expect. This is especially true when you start traveling around the world. Your wireless carrier may offer certain features on its home network; but there are times when you are shifted to another carrier's network in order to reliably offer you a connection, an act which is popularly referred to as roaming. A new commit merged to the Android Open Source Project says a future update will add a way for the OS to alert you via a notification when you begin data roaming.

The way Android is currently set up, it will actually disable mobile data when you have moved over to a network that is within the definition of roaming. Some may think this is actually just a glitch though, and enable data back again and use it normally. This new commit shows us that Google intends to do a bit more than just stop mobile data. They want to inform the user of the exact cause of action so that they are aware of the situation. This will be done by showing the user a notification with the title "Data roaming is on" and the message "Roaming charges may apply. Tap to modify."

As of right now, the commit has been merged but we are not aware of when exactly this will be available on consumer devices. It's not a change to the APIs, so Android Q's API's being finalized won't prevent this feature from being included in the launch build of Android Q. Then again, we're getting close to a stable release of this major version update, so the new commit may not make it into a public build of Android until after the Android Q launch. We'll be sure to let you know when we learn more.