Wifi Scanning

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I've never really understood how wifi scanning works in android. Do I need to enable "wifi scanning always on" to have ABS detect my SSID or is it going to get the info anyway (i.e. via cell tower detection first as in tasker)?

I've read some very confusing stuff about wifi scanning running every 15 sec, or 30 mins if everything is turned off or... what?

Thanks.

[Ondra Cermak]

Hi Lorenzo22,

ABS scans for Wifis every 10-15 minutes in order to either enable the Wifi (if Internet/Wifi is set to Optimized ON), or activate a Profile that is set up to activate when you're near a certain SSID (like Home or Work profiles).

If you have the "wifi scanning always available" turned ON in System Settings, then ABS will use it, meaning it won't turn Wifi ON for the purposes of scan. If it is OFF, then ABS will first turn Wifi ON, do a scan and turn it OFF again if there's no known Wifi around.

I hope that clears thing up a bit.

Ondra

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Yes, Ondrej perfectly clear, thank you

[REDACTED]

Ondra one more question.

If I set default Optimized profile to mobile data only and Home profile on both wifi and mobile, when does the profile switch occur? How does ABS know if I am close to a known network if I pick the phone up when wifi is off and "wifi scanning always on" is turned off? Does it scan every time the screen is turned on?

While I am home and close to my network, it looks like occasionally ABS keeps the default profile and does not turn wifi on. I may be mistaken but that's what it seems to happen.

Again, wouldn't it be much much simpler a cell tower check instead?

[Ondra Cermak]

Hi Lorenzo,

If you set the Optimized profile to Mobile data only, ABS then turns the Wifi ON in 10-15 minutes intervals in order to scan for the networks around. It doesn't scan every time screen is turned ON for the purpose of profile switching. It does so if you have Internet set to Optimized ON, but that's in order for the Wifi to stay ON if there's any Wifi you can connect to.

Cell tower check is a bit more complicated. For one thing, it isn't very accurate. You can see the same tower in quite large radius. You'd still need to scan for Wifis, even though you could do it more often when you know you're "closer" to home and less often when you don't see any of that known towers. The other thing is that from one building, you can see tens of cell towers, depending on how you move around the building. That would be quite complicated for the user to set up and if we were to do it automatically, it could be quite error prone and overall a lot of work for not that many benefits.

Ondra