hello, midas!

how can I help you today?

Hey mark

I was wondering if you know of a reliable way to check if device is connected to a wifi network with internet access

NetworkInfo was not reliable

lots of false positives

false positives on the wifi network question or the Internet access question?

Internet access

my app connects to a wifi enabled device

I'd make a benign request of some server of interest (e.g., HEAD of /robots.txt)

yeah, thats what I did, not super happy with it

IMHO, in most cases, it doesn't matter whether you can get to the Internet -- it matters whether you can get to your server

agreed

alrighty thanks anyway, I guess Ill stay on in case you think of another approach

AFAIK, all Google is doing for their "do we have Internet access" stuff at the OS level is hitting one of their own servers

to be honest, I'm not certain that there *is* another approach, almost by definition

hmmm

thats interesting

for example, suppose the device is on WiFi, but it is behind a firewall that prevents access to any Web site that has a vowel in its domain name -- is the device on the Internet or not?

your saying that andoid sdk returns false

cause it checks google.com

I wasn't referring to the SDK necessarily -- I was more thinking of the WiFi icon in the status bar that has the ! if we are connected but might not have Internet access

gotcha

AFAIK, the definition of "Internet access" for the purposes of the ! is whether they can hit one of their own servers

what about when selecting a wifi network. the system shows a list of wifi networks, if any dont have internet capability they are displayed differently

as people, we talk about "whether we have Internet access", but in reality, there are a billion shades of gray between "no connectivity" and "complete unfettered access"

um, I haven't seen that

really?

I just fired up the Settings app on a Pixel running 9.0, and while I get lock icons for whether the AP is password-protected, I do not see any indicators of whether any given AP has Internet access

it shouldn't be possible to know whether it has Internet access without connecting to it

now, all of the APs near me are secured, so I can't rule out that they have Internet-access indicators for unsecured APs

but that would be seriously creepy, if they connected to a random unsecured AP just to test for Internet access

if thats the only way it is what it is

thanks again

you're welcome, and sorry I didn't have a better solution for you!

at least I know that I have the optimal solution in place!