
Android 5.1 Fixes a Wi-Fi Annoyance - edward
http://www.wired.com/2015/03/google-android-broken-wifi/
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gbl08ma
As someone who still has a plan with a "adorably small data cap", I'm happy
and worried at the same time. I'm happy because, as most other people, I too
have had to disconnect from hotspots with captive portals manually, in order
to get the phone to switch to mobile data. But I'm also worried that this
fancy new algorithm will choose 3G instead of WiFi much often and sometimes
against my will, effectively reaching the cap much faster.

My Android 4.2 phone already does something similar with WiFi networks where
it says it "avoided a poor connection", which is annoying when you're trying
to connect to that "poor" connection precisely, and even worse when it ditches
the "poor" connection... for one with a captive portal, leaving me with a
super fast connection, indeed, but which only leads to a login page.

As someone with a capped plan who often prefers slow-but-unlimited to fast-
but-limited connections, I'd like to be able to disable the automatic switch,
and I really hope they add an option for that. In this day and age though,
everything seems to be moving in the direction of less and less
configurability...

~~~
cesarb
It's worse when the "poor" connection is because you're in the edge of its
coverage area, so you move right next to the router... and it still won't
connect, because it decided that this network was a "poor" connection and
memorized that decision. Happened to me a few days ago. Luckily, leaving it
alone for a few minutes cured that and it connected.

~~~
prattmic
I've found that turning WiFi off and on again will also reset the 'poor
connectivity' decision.

~~~
cesarb
That was the first thing I tried. Didn't work.

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TazeTSchnitzel
I do find quite often when walking around my university campus that my phone's
attempts to connect to 2-bar WiFi signals result in a much worse connection
than just turning off WiFi and letting my iPhone use 3G or 4G. I mean, if it's
4 or 5 bars (inside a building), the WiFi's as good as, or better than, 4G.
But outside, the phone keeps trying to connect to weak signals despite having
the option of superfast 4G.

Another problem is just that so many WiFi hotspots are gated and require you
to use a horrid web portal to log in. Their automatic redirection has stopped
working properly for most major sites due to HTTP Strict Transport Security,
so I have to deliberately go to an insecure site just to bring up the portal,
and if my phone loses signal for just a moment, bam, need to relog...

~~~
michaelhoffman
Browsing to [http://example.com/](http://example.com/) is perfect for finding
the captive portal.

~~~
teraflop
I thought Android already used
[http://www.gstatic.com/generate_204](http://www.gstatic.com/generate_204) for
exactly this purpose.

~~~
michaelhoffman
The notification that does this doesn't show up reliably for me.

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adamkittelson
This was one of the reasons I left AT&T.

They have hotspots everywhere that my phone would connect to and they
inevitably either sucked or were located just far enough away from the store I
was visiting that the phone could connect but not get usable internet.

I'd have to keep turning wi-fi off in order to use the internet, then
naturally I'd forget to turn it back on.

Between the removal of unlimited data plans and the strategic placement of wi-
fi internet sabotage devices I wouldn't be surprised if I had to pay AT&T some
overage as a result.

I'm on T-Mobile now with unlimited data and no useless hotspots.

~~~
driverdan
Couldn't you just delete the AT&T WiFi data from your phone so it never tries
connecting?

~~~
adamkittelson
If there was an option not to connect to AT&T wifi hotspots I couldn't find
it. Unlike most wireless routers it wouldn't only automatically connect to
ones I've used before, it would eagerly connect to any AT&T hotspot.

~~~
aninteger
There is no way to remove it via the UI. You sadly need a rooted phone to
remove it.

~~~
mortehu
I thought so at first too, but here it is on my AT&T branded Moto X:
[http://bitraf.no/~mortehu/skrot/attwifi.png](http://bitraf.no/~mortehu/skrot/attwifi.png)

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randunel
By reading the title, I actually thought they fixed _the_ biggest annoyance,
the endless-and-unfixable wifi connect-connecting-saved loop. But no, 5 years
after I first saw this error, it still occurs with the newer versions.

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tdkl
It's good that most of future customers will see it at the end of year at
best. Old customers won't.

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wsxcde
> While the Nexus 6 has already started seeing the update stateside, Google’s
> latest and greatest software still takes too long to percolate around the
> ecosystem for everyone else.

Both my Nexus 5 and first generation Nexus 7 got 5.1 a week ago. The 7 got it
before the 5, which is weird because it got Kitkat almost a month after the 5
got it.

~~~
maxerickson
My first generation Nexus 7 got 5.0 a couple of weeks ago and 5.1 today. First
impression is that 5.1 is much smoother, I wonder if they prioritized the
devices that were sluggish with 5.0.

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PaulHoule
I dunno.

When my new Nexus 7 tablet got "upgraded" to Android 5 it felt like a
downgrade. WiFi worked OK before but now it is slow and unreliable on any
network I try. Also the full disk encryption makes EVERYTHING slow.

Lots of vendors are releasing new tablets with Android 4.4 because the user
experience is so much better. And don't get me started on the "Material
Design" fanbois who just have to have their car and their house and their rug
fit in with Material Design.

So far as I am concerned, Android 5 is like Windows 8 but the media is
treating Google with kid gloves compared to Microsoft because if Bing dropped
them out of the search results they wouldn't notice, but Google could put any
media company out of business in an eyeblink.

~~~
hayksaakian
Same here, but 5.1 made it much better

I was getting system error popups every 30 seconds from various apps on 5.0.

~~~
fernandotakai
on my n5, it feels waay snappier on 5.1. battery is better too.

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msoad
To me the biggest annoyance is when phone connects to WiFi but doesn't open a
browser to login or accept terms so it's just silently done't work at all

~~~
mortehu
Apple and Android devices connect to fixed URLs[1][2] to verify the
connection. Some captive portals whitelist only those URLs, so you only see
this behavior when the captive portal creator wants it to happen.

1\.
[http://www.apple.com/library/test/success.html](http://www.apple.com/library/test/success.html)

2\.
[http://clients3.google.com/generate_204](http://clients3.google.com/generate_204)

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pmontra
I don't understand the problem that was solved. Android devices can forget a
WiFi network (long press the WiFi icon for the menu), manually select a
network (same menu) and can disable WiFi and/or 3G. You never connect to a
network you don't want to connect to.

~~~
msellout
This fails when two networks have the same name and different characteristics,
and you want connections to be automated. It's frustrating when I accidentally
connect to a poor network just at the edge of range.

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rikkus
What would have been better, though perhaps not technically possible, was to
try WiFi while keeping the mobile data active, only switching if the WiFi
worked well. Not sure it's possible to run both at the same time, though.

~~~
organsnyder
It already does that for access points that require logging in (or accepting a
ToS). It shows an exclamation point on the wifi icon, and continues to use
mobile data.

This behavior was introduced to my Nexus 5 beginning with Android 5.0. It's
actually a bit annoying—it broke an app I had purchased that could record and
replay scripts to automatically log me in to access points, and the app maker
can't (last I checked) find an API that will allow them to re-create the
functionality.

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chrishynes
I don't get why this can't happen dynamically and automatically. Detect
latency and dropped packets on WiFi and fall back to LTE. Just run both
networks side by side and route over the healthier one.

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yborg
Comcast is by far the biggest offender. More than half the xfinitywifi APs I
connected to had no usable connectivity. Ended up removing the network
completely and never connecting to any of them. As expected of Comcast, the
Preventer of Information Access, I know.

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mark_l_watson
I don't have a huge data plan (my wife and I share 3 gigs a month) but that is
enough so we can switch off wifi when leaving our house. I don't like using
public wifi anyway.

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aftbit
This seems like a non-problem:

1\. Disable auto-connect to open wifi.

2\. If you connect to wifi and it's broken, just pull down the quick settings
panel and turn wifi off.

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zaroth
In other news your phone now includes an additional database which records
everywhere you've ever been with it!

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chatmasta
Does anyone else hate these tech headlines that begin "X just did Y." It's the
inclusion of "just" that for some reason infuriates me. It seems to imply some
degree of worship toward the company who "just" did this. Thank god! Our
saviors!

Am I totally alone on this sentiment?

~~~
deanclatworthy
No you're not alone. The title is verging on clickbait as it doesn't tell you
how they fixed it.

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rasz_pl
Title should be "Google decided to log even more data about your environment"

