I have next case:
Wifi assist enabled
I connected my iphone to WIFI without inet
connection
I enabled Cellular Data(mobile data)
My app cant send requests. Network is unreachable.
I try open some page with safary, but "server cannot be found"
I thougth if I enable assist, ios should switch between GSM and Wifi, am I right?
Any idias or advice
I have had this problem too for a long time. Talked to Apple about it online but their solution was not to forward this to their developers for a bug fix, but to install the next update and see if this helps. So Apple's solution is to not do anything. Thanks for that.
The issue seems to be that the wifi assist only works on wifi signal strength and not on the ability to actually meaningfully transfer data to load even the most fundamental of website homepages. There is only one solution at the moment and that is that when you encounter these wifi networks that load nothing, that you have to go into your wifi option in settings and manually 'Forget this network'.
Not ideal but that's the only solution I have that seems to work.
Related
I need your knowledge and/or opinions about this since I'm concerned if someone is doing it, or if the WiFi signal isn't strong.
My laptop is connected to WiFi that I do not own (they know that it is connected and they know it's me), and I am just watching YouTube videos, then after like 7 minutes I get disconnected from WiFi. When that happens, I just restart my laptop and it auto-connects to the WiFi. The fastest that I got disconnected is when the moment I opened my Google Chrome browser.
My laptop is near to the modem/router. This is happening like when I feel like it's coming and it's kinda fast. Here are my questions about this:
I use an add-on VPN for my Google Chrome browser, does this affect my connection?
They use an Apple iPhone. Could it be that they're disconnecting it from the phone?
Does a USB WiFi adapter help, and is there a USB WiFi adapter without needing to put in WiFi info?
Is there any software that can help me detect if someone is cutting me off from the WiFi connection?
Maybe there's an app they use that can disconnect me from WiFi?
What are my defense options?
Maybe it is because of the brand of the laptop?
I've burnt out of questions for now, but there must be more. Please help.
I also just saw that my Internet connection got disconnected then reconnected again in just like 1 or 2 seconds.
It doesn't sound like they are 'disconnecting' you. To me, I would first check the DHCP settings within the WiFi router, but if you don't own it, that might not be possible.
It sounds like you are unable to maintain a valid IP address. I think this is happening due to the fact that when you restart your machine, and request a new IP, it seems to work for a short period of time. It's a tough problem to troubleshoot without more information though.
I have couple of URLs that has to be called(programatically) through wifi not with mobile data.
As WIFI ASSIST is on , whenever the wifi is weak ,packets get transferred through Mobile data.
I would like to stop this from happening.
As far as I have researched, there is no API to toggle wifi assist switch on and off programatically
I can find if the user has mobile data and wifi on with the help of Reachability Class I believe and I can alert the user to keep wifi assist off but this is a very bad user experience.
so I decided to look if its possible to be done with the help of iOS mobile configuration file.
But I couldn't find any keys related with wifi-assist in Apple configuration profile reference.
so I am wondering , is it possible to force wifi to be used for certain URLs.
I remember this is possible with VPN ON DEMAND we can have certain domains to be accessed via VPN.
I am wondering if same is possible for wifi as well through configuration profile
Any suggestions are welcome.
As others have mentioned, there is no way to do manipulate this setting programmatically in iOS. This is not really what you are asking, as you seem to already know the answer to this is "No".
You are asking about the configuration profile, so I am assuming these are managed devices. Unfortunately, there is no configuration profile payload I am aware of that forces the managed devices to disable Wi-Fi Assist.
Your intent, however, is a bit different than what is being asked, I believe. I think you basically have an app that communicates with a resource that is only accessible via the Wi-Fi network (likely a corporate Wi-Fi network). If the app tries to connect to the resource while on cellular, it will not be able to connect. In some cases, when the Wi-Fi signal is weak, the device tries to be helpful and switches to cellular, causing issues with the app. If we could figure out a way to force iOS to not take advantage of Wi-Fi Assist when your app is running, you would be in good shape.
If you can install this app as a managed app, there is a way to identify that the app should only be allowed to run on a Wi-Fi connection. Setting the network usage rules AllowCellularData to false should do this (see this for more details). The thing I am not sure of with this solution, is whether this simply causes the connections to fail when Wi-Fi Assist is on and active, or if it makes iOS prefer to not use Wi-Fi assist when the app is running because it cannot connect over cellular. So I think you can tell an app to only connect over WiFi, but it doesn't really give you a better solution to your user experience problem. The only think it really buys you is that your app connection won't ever try to connect when connected to cellular. There is a chance, however, if you change this value to false for your app bundle ID, it will prevent Wi-Fi Assist from enabling when your app is running. I don't have access to MDM to try it out, but you could test and see.
Ultimately, given that this is probably a corporate device situation, I think you are going to have to address this through user training. The good news is that this is a one-time step. Sure, users may have slight degradation of network performance when Wi-Fi signal is weak but cell signal is strong. This does not matter as much if these are corporate devices where the corporate apps will mostly work only on the company's Wi-Fi network.
Another solution is what you mentioned, basically using on-demand VPN to provide a connection to the internal resources. This is additional infrastructure work, and you already mentioned it, so I'm not sure if it is even an option.
Obviously, the other solution would be to expose the network resources through your firewall, which could allow you to access it over cellular. I'm suspecting this is not possible due to security constraints.
Unfortunately, there are not a lot of good options in this space. However, have hope that there is some way to do it, as Sonos appears to have done something to
allow their app to avoid switching to WiFi Assist while streaming to a local network resource: https://sonos.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/4257/~/wi-fi-assist-and-sonos
I wonder if you could have your app open a streaming audio connection to a fixed local network resource, which would cause it to use Wi-Fi. It's a pretty crazy hack, but with a low enough bitrate audio file streaming, it might do what you need while not eating up too much of the network throughput.
Per Apple's notes on Wi-Fi Assist:
Wi-Fi Assist won't automatically switch to cellular if you're data
roaming.
Wi-Fi Assist only works when you have apps running in the
foreground and doesn't activate with background downloading of
content.
Wi-Fi Assist doesn’t activate with some third-party apps
that stream audio or video, or download attachments, like an email
app, as they might use large amounts of data.
Of course the other possible solution that you could consider is improving your Wi-Fi coverage to that the signal doesn't get bad enough for Wi-Fi Assist to be needed. I know this may not be feasible, but wanted to put it out there.
Good luck with this!
There is no public API that allows you to enable/disable "Wi-Fi Assist", and even if you find a way to do it your app will be rejected.
No you can not enable or disable WiFi by programmatically and there is no API for this.
I’m not talking about Reachability.
What I’m talking about is figuring out how to create a network connection from an iOS device across the cellular interface.
Why? Because I have conditions where the device connects to a WiFi access point so it chooses WiFi… but that access point is not internet connected and goes nowhere. I have data which I must make every effort to deliver and it some cases it’s getting lost in the WiFi gateway to purgatory. In both cases of using Reachability and relying on MPTCP, Apple has already given priority to WiFi in the stack.
I know NSURLSessionConfiguration can set allowsCellularAccess to allow cellular access — I’m looking to require cellular for the routing.
Even at the CFNetwork level I’m looking at kCFStreamPropertyConnectionIsCellular for status, kCFStreamPropertyNoCellular to disable cellular.
I can’t find anyway to give preference to the cellular radio. I realize Apple has gone to great lengths to prefer WiFi and I’m going against that — which is why I’m having such difficulty finding an answer to this.
I'd like to keep this up in the Cocoa level, but not opposed to going into Foundation or deeper levels. I would like to avoid trying to parse an interface table (if it's even accessible) to figure out which is the cellular interface.
Has anyone successfully created a network connection across the cellular link despite WiFi appearing to be present?
Is some configuration of Multipath TCP the answer here?
To bind to a particular interface, as far as I'm aware, you'd have to drop all the way down to the raw socket level, and there's no way to provide a custom socket for NSURLSession purposes, so you'd basically be rewriting it from scratch. You should file a bug asking for support for binding an NSURLSession to a source IP.
The behavior you're experiencing is a known problem with iOS and disconnected networks. iOS 9 and later do a better job, but even then, they can be highly problematic; the devices sometimes refuse to talk to the Wi-Fi network, and sometimes refuse to talk to the cellular network. Specifically, it seems to fail spectacularly if either signal is weak. Just this morning, I actually had to force my iPhone (iOS 10) to talk to a disconnected Wi-Fi network by putting it in Airplane mode and enabling only Wi-Fi.
I'm told that you can fix this by configuring the network's DHCP server to not provide a router advertisement; that said, every time I've tried that, the iOS device would just keep asking for an offer repeatedly. Maybe that bug got fixed at some point. If so, it might be worth a shot, but don't expect it to work in older versions of iOS.
Failing that, assuming you don't need to support web browsers in iOS 3 and earlier, you might try eliminating the DHCP server on that Wi-Fi network entirely, and just rely on DNS service discovery with zero-conf IPs. That way, the device won't see a router, and it won't try to send data out that interface except to those link-local IPs.
If that isn't possible for some reason, ordinarily I would suggest using a customized copy of libcurl, except that I doubt this will work in your case, because POSIX networking doesn't wake the cellular hardware.
In iOS 12 and later you can use the Network Framework. Sample code is here.
My iPhone is connected to cellular network and my own WiFi. If I go to the basement I'm still connected to wifi, by cellular connection goes down. How can I know that the cellular connection is active or not?
You need "Reachability". Apple have provided it since the early days of the SDK, there is a link to a version by Tony Miller in this answer and it is also part of the highly recommended AFNetworking (another relevant answer). It will tell you whether you have any connection and what kind it is.
In my app I am using Apple's Reachability sample to check for a WiFi connection (reachabilityForLocalWiFi). If there is no connection a view is shown pretty much like in the App Store app when you have no connection.
This works quite well, but one user now reported problems when using the personal hotspot feature of iOS:
When I use WiFi Personal Hotspot I get the No WiFi message, even though my PC is connected to it.
Does anyone know why this is and how I can fix it? My main problem is that my provider doesn't allow the hotspot feature, so I am not able to test things...