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Comment by Mister_Snuggles | Hacker News Reader

Why should it even have to check a Samsung URL? Why not just let each "app" decide if it can get to what it needs to?

Imagine if your Samsung phone couldn't do anything that required an internet connection because Samsung's site was down. This is pretty much the same thing, IMHO.

Samsung's site being down or unreachable should have no bearing on the performance of the Netflix app whatsoever.

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Which servers do you think your Apple or Google smartphones ping to check for internet connectivity? ;-) It's true that apps generally perform reachability tests on their own sites but global reachability checks can still affect the preference of wifi over cellular, for instamce. And the preferred method on Android to check for reachability, unlike iOS samples, uses the phone's checks rather than pinging a host of your choice.

So just for fun I turned off the WAN connection on my router. Effectively, I had no internet access but I do have a wireless LAN with some local devices.

Safari on iOS did not tell me "you don't have internet connectivity", but it did say that servers were unreachable (not surprising) and it let me use local servers without issue. iOS seems to prefer WiFi to cellular when it's available as it didn't fall back during my limited test.

This is the behaviour that I'd expect from the Smart TV. Just because it can't get to Samsung doesn't mean it can't get to Netflix.

When you connect to a Wifi network, iOS checks http://www.apple.com/library/test/success.html to see if you're in a captive portal (and pop up a full screen webview to let you log into the wifi, or cancel to fail out of it)

I imagine if Apple's DNS settings got screwed up or their server was throwing up something other than "Success" due to an error, iOS devices around the world would claim their Wifi needed a login and wasn't working.

edit: another comment further down linked this article that says that exactly the same thing happened to iOS http://www.zdnet.com/what-went-wrong-with-ios-6-wi-fi-700000...

I was actually hoping that I'd see some misbehaviour when I ran my little test, but on the surface it appears that Apple learned from that mistake.

The results might have been different if I had ran the test longer or turned WiFi off and back on or something.

I believe Apple has an agreement with Akamai. Here are some data points for just one household with two macs, two iPhones, and two iPads

www.isg-apple.com.akadns.net 571 requests in the last day

us-courier.push-apple.com.akadns.net 558 requests in the last day

.akamai.net 709 requests in the last day

and

.akamaiedge.net 1967 requests in the last day

I believe Google just uses *.l.google.com (my open dns says 1202 requests in the last day)

iOS and OS X uses http://www.apple.com/library/test/success.html for WiFi captive portal testing

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