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
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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