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Comment by bubblethink | Hacker News Reader

Tangential: I find networking (both wifi and cellular) to be one of the most problematic parts in a smartphone. These are quite literally the things that make a smartphone. This may be OS and device specific, but with AOSP on a pixel, these are my common issues: 1) Frequent wifi disconnects 2) Phone shows connected to both wifi and cellular but internet doesn't work 3) Cellular data is supposed to be always on but doesn't work as intended 4) Wifi-Calling drops call if wifi disconnects (which is probably a combination of 1 and 3). 4) Phone prefers shitty wifi (for eg. while driving by near an AP) over cellular. Does everyone have some variation of these problems ? Have iphones solved these for good ?

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FWIW I've got a Samsung S8, and I'm located in Norway.

Points 1-3 has not happened to me, or if it has so rarely I can't remember. Point 4 has happened, though I've since set my phone to prefer cellular, which to a large extent mitigates this.

Point 5 I experience a variant of. My phone is set to not connect to open/random AP's, so I don't have directly the issue mentioned. Rather I see the phone clinging on to a known AP for too long, where switching to cellular would be better.

For example when I'm on my way home, I want to check the real-time bus schedule. By the time I've loaded up the app, I'm on the outskirts of the wifi AP's range. So for a minute or so I'm without any internet while my phone tries to get in touch with the AP before finally giving up.

Ideally my phone should have noticed that the range to the AP is declining steadily and that I have good cellular coverage, so it should have switched proactively when the wifi signal gets very low.

Overall though, both calls and internet just works for me.

I’ve largely stopped using WiFi except for my home and work wifi. Seems to solve a lot of my wifi issues as the wifi networks I have access to at home and work locations is very robust. Everywhere else I just use my mobile carrier’s 3G/4G service which is usually much better than wifi. Helps that I have lots of data as part of my plan so I literally never run out of data.

Some manufacturers have things like "WiFi+" (Huawei) which performs regular speed tests and saves regular location data to estimate the end-user speeds.

You can also turn on some developer settings; e.g. mobile data always on (even with WiFi turned on).

Can't say if Apple got this right.

this do not sell. A while ago phones where purchased on internal memory size (and a fixed $100 upgrade steps for some reason). Until recently purchase decision was based on screen size, bigger the better. Now they are decided on a notch on the screen apparently.

Absolutely nobody buying phones care about the items you listed, unfortunately.

They absolutely do, it’s just impossible to quantify. When the WiFi hardware is garbage on a phone non-technical people just call it “slow/buggy/glitchy” without really being able to identify why.

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