Help Ignore WiFi (except home,or other good ones)

[ronstrilaeff]

It's like my phone (droid maxx) tries too hard to connect to whatever wifi it sees. I have it set to "avoid poor connections", but sometimes I'll be a re-routing or need to look something up in town on google and notice that access is dead slow, because it connected to some lame open wifi across the street or something. Sometimes I even get a popup that asks me what is my "wifi carrier" ... wtf?!

So what I have done in that case is just turn off wifi, so it will reconnect to cellular and immediately start working again.

The problem is that my wifi is now off and will therefore ignore all the good wifis (like when I'm at home or someplace that actually has a decent signal). Two days later I realize that I've been using my precious data plan for all those must see cute grandkid videos because I forgot to turn the phone's wifi back on ... doh!

So ... does anyone know some combination of settings (or a widget?) that will make my droid maxx ignore all wifi networks except the ones I know and trust to work reliably?

 

[mikedt]

That doesn't sound like normal Android behaviour, it shouldn't be trying to actually connect to whatever arbitrary open WiFi it finds, because that's rather undesirable, because you're going to be getting landing/login pages, plus open WiFi is completely insecure. It might notify you about open WiFi networks being available, but it should not be actually connecting to them by itself.

Droid Maxx, that's Verizon isn't it? There was some posts a while back about certain US carriers, sure it was Sprint modifying their customized phones to automatically connect to "partner" open WiFi networks, like McDonald's, KFC, Starbucks, etc. Think it's called "Network optimizer" or something similar in the settings, and you have to disable it. Can't find the relevant threads at the moment, which had all the details.

 

[ronstrilaeff]

Yeah it is Verizon ... and the probably do have some default service that elbows its way in.

So after I figure out how to kill that, I heard about three apps that might cover me:
1. MacroDroid
2. Droid Automation
3. Tasker

Has anyone used these and which one do you find most reliable (and simplest to manage)?