why do phones try to stick to a connected wifi network for dear life even though I’ve moved far from it that it’s barely useable anymore; all while I’m near another ‘remembered’ wifi network with very strong signal?
The phone knows the password of the other wifi that I’m near at, and i have set it to auto-join. But no it refuse to connect to it and prefer to hold onto where it’s last connected. I need to manually tap the other network everytime I move.
In: Engineering
Well it’s a bit of an edge case of not many people needing it to do that, but there’re also issues it could cause. Your connection would drop for a moment as it switches, which admittedly may not be that bad if it’s in a situation where the signal is dropping anyway though. Another problem is if you’re going through something that required you to do some sort of anti-DDOS verification then switching network may cause you to need to redo that, which is annoying if triggered without you choosing to switch network.
The phone doesn’t know that the other network has better internet until it joins, which it won’t do as long as it’s still getting internet from the slow one, no matter how slow.
This is different from the same WiFi network on multiple access points, which do allow the phone to switch.
On a similar note, why does Spotify take so long to start playing a downloaded song, when connected like this? It shouldnt require any data at all
I have asked the same question many times. And now this company wants to ‘something’ with A.I.
Your phone knows it has working connectivity on the current network and it doesn’t necessarily look for another network until it drops off.
Now, there are ways to mitigate this – a properly configured WiFi network will have a minimum rate set to something sensible, so clients will drop off sooner. A proper multi-ap deployment would also use a setup that properly hands off clients between different access points.
Your phone will not check for other signals as long as it is conected to one. Imagine if there were many signals available, your phone would just be constantly switching up with the slightest change.
It’s a complicated problem, and getting it wrong can have consequences.
Network connectivity is weird. You don’t know if you have it until you try. You might have strong wifi. But if a DNS server is down, or if the site you need to access is down, trying to use the network will fail. If the signal is weaker, maybe you can connect to a site, but the degraded signal introduces enough errors that slow things down you can’t get anything meaningful done.
In software, a ton of that is “abstracted”, meaning it’s hidden from the developers to make their lives a little easier. It would be very hard to write applications if they all had to be aware of all of the details happening at the TCP or UDP level (those are protocols commonly used for network communication). So a lot of times all a developer knows is “it failed” or “it took a long time”. They don’t get a lot of information about why. And on mobile devices, the developers can’t usually ask the device to change networks if things are going wrong. So they’re stuck.
What about the people who made the phone? Well, it’s still a mystery. They can tell at a low level what is happening with the network, but for many problems “the remote server is having an issue” and “I am having an issue” look identical.
They have to write code for every case. Not everybody has 2 available, joinable networks. They have to worry that a network you joined previously may have changed settings and it may be inaccessible this time. They have to worry that maybe a critical program you use doesn’t handle it if networks change while you are using it. (I’ve seen this before, where an API uses IPs to identify users and gets upset if you switch from WiFi to cellular while using it!) That would mean if it changes networks as you move around your house you’d be constantly interrupted! Finally, they have to try to avoid moving to cellular data because a lot of people still have limits and pay money for that data, and would prefer not to use it.
So while it seems like an easy problem, it’s a hard one. If the phone is too eager to change networks, some people are going to be upset because their programs get disrupted when the phone bounces between two similar-strength networks. If the phone is not eager enough, people end up in artificial dead zones. (This happens to me, my phone loves to hold my house’s WiFi until the end of the block, but the signal is so weak I can’t use it by the time I leave my driveway.) If the phone is too quick to drop WiFi, it could waste its user’s money by using cellular data when it doesn’t need to.
In short, the only way to do the “right” thing is to be you and to write a program to describe how you’d like the phone to handle the network changes. That opens up a lot of other cans of worms, as most people don’t have the tools, knowledge, or gumption to try that.
I have a similar problem where my phone loses WiFi as I leave home, but it so desperately wants WiFi that it’ll keep trying and failing rather then switch to 5G even though it’ll have a strong signal. It takes waaaay too long and I have to cycle airplane mode at least once until it finally gives up and uses the strong 5G signal it should have switched to 3 minutes ago.
A modern phone will. For this to work well without annoying the user, it require the phone to be capable of having two simultaneous connections.
As WiFi signal only means you can connect to that WiFi access point/router. But it doesn’t mean that access point is actually connected to the internet.
So worst case m, you phone would drop your current connection with bad reception, but internet, for a WiFi with perfect reception but no internet at all. And whatever WiFi call or similar you are on would be fully interrupted.
Additionally since mobile data usually costs or is in some way volume limited, the phone will also try to stay on a WiFi network with internet in favour of switching over to mobile.
This with a modern phone; with the capability of connecting to the second WiFi to check for connectivity, you’ll get a better user experience; because it’ll actually switch over to the WiFi with stronger reception.
Unfortunately virtually no phone ever allows you to properly set up what specific behaviour you want for it to have. It’s all precalculated AI bullshit of guessing what might work best.
Even when you want the phone to prioritise WiFi A over B all the time. It doesn’t allow you to change the setting.
Basically you get a one size fits no one solution that’s ’good enough’ which prevents users from setting things up wrong and writing bad reviews.
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