Android 5.1 Fixes a Wi-Fi Annoyance

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...

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...

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.

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.

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

> 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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