Everyday living involves public Wi-Fi networks, but logging in can be difficult. However, a minor but helpful modification to the way Captive Portals—the login screens that appear when you connect—operate may soon make it a little simpler for Android users to access these networks.
Nowadays, you may be prompted to provide personal information or even sign in with a social media account when attempting to access public Wi-Fi. The issue? You must manually enter all of your information because these Captive Portals do not have access to your autofill data. This occurs as a result of these portals opening in an Android System WebView, a simple technique for displaying web pages within applications. Unlike Google Chrome, it doesn’t share your browsing history or autofill information.
The answer? Google is working on enabling Captive Portals to open in Android Custom Tabs, per a recent report. Apps may access your saved passwords, payment information, and autofill data by using Custom Tabs to open web pages in the default browser. This makes logging in much faster and simpler. Although this modification has already been largely incorporated into Android’s code, it is not yet fully operational.
Connecting to, say, the airport Wi-Fi will be much easier after this update is released. You won’t have to waste time entering all of those details, particularly the password, which we all forget sometimes, let’s face it.
Though this upgrade will speed up the process of connecting to public Wi-Fi, it doesn’t actually increase security. For instance, there will still be a chance of “evil twin” assaults, which are phony Wi-Fi networks created to steal your personal data. However, this upgrade should generally make using Wi-Fi much less irritating. Watch out for it—devices running Android 10 or later are probably going to get it shortly.
In other Android-related news, Google is trying to increase the number of third-party camera apps that support RAW photos. Furthermore, the release date of Android 16 was recently alluded to.