How to enable WiFi and to make list of the devices found after searching for wifi connectivity in android phone ?
Android devices could not originally do this without an access point in between, except by rooting and directly manipulating the network settings to permit ad-hoc wireless. However a few newer devices seem to support it.
Android Wifi direct multiple connection ad-hoc
(Arguably this could be closed as a duplicate of that, but I thought there was room for more explanation than found there. There was another recent question too, but I can't find it)
If one device supports wifi tethering that can be enabled and the other connect to it, but then all network traffic from the other device would go through it, potentially using up the data plan (ie, okay for two devices with the same owner, not a good idea for casual transfers)
The "standard" solution would still be to use a wifi access point, and potentially to do the transfer via an Internet server as intermediary, which has the side benefit of not needing the devices to be on the same network.
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In my flutter app, I need to get information from a device via wifi as a stream. Also I need to keep my google maps online via Mobile internet. How can I use both wifi and mobile network at the same time in my phone. I made a lot of search but I can't find any solution for this.
I don't think it's possible.
The phone would need two network antennas and possibly two network adapters.
You can surely toggle both wifi and mobile data at the same time and they can probably switch frequently to optimize your connection or send requests to different services.
But you can't really use them both at the same time.
(if it's possible) I don't recommend it, since a majority of phones will not support this feature since you need two network antennas.
From the facts as presented, there are a couple of possible solutions, but they aren't perfect and I'm guessing on one as I haven't tested it yet.
One, Google Maps has an offline mode. You can set it up to download maps for offline use. It will show your position on the maps whether you are connected to the internet or not, but you won't get traffic data or accurate travel times. Not great, but it can work.
Two, it is possible for a phone to have a WiFi network and Cellular network active at the same time, but not in the way everyone seemed to think. Since you are wanting the cellular connection open to have access to the internet, I'm assuming this is because the WiFi network you want to access doesn't have the internet. So, reverse the WiFi network. Setup your phone to be a hotspot network, it runs its own WiFi network while maintaining access to the internet through its cellular network. I'm guessing here, but unless phones have some specific security protocol forbidding it I don't know about (which can be the case), your app should be able to contact anything connected to its phone's WiFi while still having access to the internet.
If this doesn't work for some reason, you can try a trick I used when I set up a car office. Get a mobile hotspot device. It's a device you can put a cellular SIMM in and it creates a WiFi hotspot. You can connect to it, along with other devices in the car. All will being using WiFi and the hotspot will provide the internet access.
If what you are connected to can only create a WiFi network for you to access and it can't be configured to connect to one itself, you could technically still be able to do it by network switching. Much harder to do (probably impossible on some devices) and will likely mess with other apps depending on internet access, so a real break glass in case of emergency type of situation there.
I'd like to have my app able to create P2P connections between users over both wifi and cellular (if wifi is available I'll use it but it needs to support cellular too).
I've seen many questions/answers relating to wifi but none for cellular. Is this possible?
If it is, are there any libraries/packages out there that help do it?
The solution would also need to support both iOS and Android and be cross-compatible between the two.
I am currently researching task offloading strategies for mobile devices and need to be able to transfer data between devices automatically without the users being on the same WiFi network. As far as I know the user needs to explicitly accept connections both with WiFi Direct(P2P) and Bluetooth.
Is there any way around the explicit connection acceptance? Does other/better options exist?
Anything goes as long as it enables me to share data between devices in an ubiquitous fashion. Preferably without rooting the device.
An alternative is the Google Nearby API. It allows you to discover, connect and send data to nearby devices without any promt and without having to root the device.
Some documentation can be found here: https://developers.google.com/nearby/connections/android/discover-devices
A good code example can be found here: https://github.com/android/connectivity-samples/blob/a7df97eee9b2a553760d338babc6f24e4dc73cf7/NearbyConnectionsRockPaperScissors/app/src/main/java/com/google/location/nearby/apps/rockpaperscissors/MainActivity.java
I've started to develop a chat application for Android. This app is supposed to function without internet and, most importantly, without an access point; It has to connect Android devices in a pure P2P manner.
However I've followed the following tutorials posted in android developers guide:
http://developer.android.com/training/connect-devices-wirelessly/nsd.html
http://developer.android.com/training/connect-devices-wirelessly/wifi-direct.html#fetch
Afterwards, I've tested my app on 3 devices, the problem is one of the devices acts as an access point, preventing other devices from connecting with each other if they are connected to it.
This doesn't work for my app, because I want each user to be able to connect to multiple users at the same time.
What do you suggest I do in order to achieve pure P2P connection for my Android app?
Does the group owner acts as an access point?
EDIT
After I've done some research I found the WiFi Direct is not suitable for my project since it has to assign a device as an access point, what I'm looking for is WiFi ad hoc mode or (IBSS) in Android Anybody got any suggestion on how to start working on that?
By using bt and wifi simultaneously, you can try to extend the network further. This will require some kind of packet routing.
Also, it seems android ignores wlan cards connected to usb otg - just plugging in extra wlan dongles could allow easy extension of network.
I try to create an ad-hoc network between many Android devices, but I can't find documentation to do that.
I thought Wifi direct could work for what I want, but is it possible to have multiple connection on one device ? I saw that we could do a device acting like an access point and communicate with many devices, but can we communicate from one client device to two access point devices ?
I have for example 3 devices: A -> B -> C
The "A" device need to communicate with "C" device but he's too far away, so I want to have ad-hoc wifi direct connection between A&B and ad-hoc wifi direct connection between B&C, so A can communicate with C. It should also work with more than 3 devices.
Thanks !
Here is the link to the Wifi Direct Demo http://developer.android.com/resources/samples/WiFiDirectDemo/index.html
I have been working on establishing ad hoc communication over Android phones for a month. I am trying to create an app that could work without having 3G or access point. Main idea is to let the clients to be able transfer voice or data in a close range.
There are some guys implemented a basic system regarding almost the same topic. It basically works with Wi-Fi access point. So you need an access point in order to establish the connection. Although this is not what I am looking for, it might be helpful for others. You might need to contact them for more details.
https://sites.google.com/site/androidwalkietalkie/home
Android does not have support for ad-hoc WiFi at this time -- sorry!
Update (2019): Android has supported WiFi Direct for a while, and this answer has not been updated.
Your scenario would work. A would be able to connect with C as long as B (the group owner) is within range of both A and C.
See Android's developer documentation for more info:
https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/connectivity/wifip2p
At this time only Galaxy S 2 support Wi-Fi Direct
The wifi direct supports concurrent hosting and client capabilities on single interface. Which means, the device will act as an AP, allowing other devices to connect to it as clients, And also connect to another AP as a client. And can share internet connection by driving the internet traffic between the interfaces.
However, current implementations of wifi direct on android are specific to the phone and not part of andorid sdk. So there is not much clarity if they support concurrency. This capability is not limited by hardware.
Ad hoc wifi is disabled in Android. You need to ask Google why they have chosen to do so. If you have access to a device that allow you to install custom Android images, you will be able to patch Android to support it. Or you can root your device and reenable ad hoc Wifi, there are plenty of solutions on the web on how to enable ad hoc on rooted Android devices. This is a software issue, the hardware on every Android device that I know of has support for ad hoc Wifi.
The Serval Project, based in part on WiFi Tether, is the only place I've found this functionality. It's still alpha phase, but seems to be the forerunner in the field. The wiki is much more useful than the main project page linked above, with installation instructions and a bit of documentation.
Serval may or may not be right for your needs, but I felt it should be pointed out that ad-hoc networking is not impossible on Android. It might be better to wait until Google gets around to implementing it as standard API, though (if you believe they ever will :) ).
Well You might be interested in looking at AllJoyn. It is qualcoms SDK for android OS which includes wi-fi peer-to-peer implementations by creating adhoc connections. This is same as Wi-Fi Direct.