iOS 11 automatically ignores flaky Wi-Fi connections

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Flaky Wi-fi
You should already have this switched off.
Photo: Cult of Mac

With iOS 11, your iPhone gets smart enough to realize when a Wi-Fi connection is flaky, and gives up trying to join it. This might be most useful if you’re one of those people who keeps your Ask Join Networks setting activated, but it should help anyone who uses their iPhone in multiple places — i.e. everyone ever.

Auto Join Disabled

Ryan Jones pointed out the new iOS 11 feature on Twitter:


It seems that iOS 11 notices when it encounters problems connecting to a Wi-Fi network, or if the network connects but provides a spotty connection, and just gives up trying. For instance, you might regularly walk through your office building and keep losing your cellular connection as your iPhone joins weak Wi-Fi networks along the way.

No more interrupted internet in iOS 11.
No more interrupted internet in iOS 11.
Photo: Ryan Jones

These may be networks you know. You might be perfectly happy to connect to them you’re actually in a particular office, or using the cafeteria’s connection. But you would probably prefer that your phone ignores when you’re just passing through. In iOS 11, it will.

The only downside is that you will now need to manually join these networks. So far, I have been unable to test whether you can toggle this setting on a per-network basis. It’s not clear whether you can force iOS 11 to keep trying to join a network, even if it doesn’t want to, like a child forced to eat his gravy-coated vegetables long after they’ve gone cold.

Lots of great new features in iOS 11

Cupertino pitches macOS High Sierra as a Snow Leopard-style maintenance release, with lots of welcome tweaks and fixes. But it looks like Apple’s engineers also went over iOS 11 to improve all kinds of small details. That’s a welcome addition to all the headline features we’ve seen, like drag-and-drop, the updated iOS 11 dock, and the all-new multitouch gestures.

 

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