How to stop android from saying "no internet" on wifi?

[Red Squirrel]

I've been blocking my phone from accessing google IPs because I noticed lot of data leaking and just trying to make things more secure, but as a result it fails the "internet check" because it's connecting to their own servers to check that. Is there a way to just disable that feature altogether? I always found it annoying anyway because there are some networks I do connect to that have no internet and it gives more trouble, such as not wanting to automatically reconnect, or blocking all local traffic. That is the issue I see now, I can access internet sites but not local ones. Is there a way to just disable that altogether so it works normally?

 

[mxnerd]

see if 'Avoid poor connections' checkbox in Advanced WiFi helps.

https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/110471/disable-internet-access-detection-of-wifi-networks

 

[Red Squirrel]

Unfortunately I don't seem to have that option listed, as is my luck with this sort of stuff. I wonder if it requires the phone to be rooted. Suppose I should lookup how to do that as it seems lot of more advanced stuff requires it.

Suppose another solution is to figure out what Android does to detect internet, such as if it connects to an IP or a host and then just redirect that traffic to a local server. Downside is if it's encrypted I won't really see what it's doing, but maybe just having that IP accessible is enough, if it's simply doing a basic request looking for a server response.

 

[mxnerd]

Just rooting probably won't work. You probably need to find if there is after market firmware for your device and replace the factory firmware.

It's always very risky if you didn't do it properly. If you have no experience doing it before, watch a lot of tutorials on Youtube first.

Check out XDA forum https://forum.xda-developers.com/

==

Don't know if we can use proxy, local DNS or any firewall APPs to block Android accessing those (burn-in?) IP addresses or FQDN. We need to find them out first, however.

 

[Red Squirrel]

From what I read, my phone (DTEK50) does not support 3rd party firmwares, so I'm kind of out of luck there.

Next phone I buy I will do some research to make sure it actually supports 3rd party firmware, then that will solve the whole security thing as a whole as I can find some custom firmware where they stripped out all the Google stuff, hopefully.

Figured I could at least just block all the google/other suspicious IP ranges (I keep adding them as I find new ones) to at least gain a bit of privacy back. Basically I check my firewall to look for any weird traffic then lookup the IP owner and full subnet and block that. Phones are leaky.

 

[mxnerd]

Just checked my Samsung smartphone access log with my Pi-Hole setup. It at least logged the following Google stuff

firebase-settings.crashlytics.com

settings.crashlytics.com

firebaseinstallations.googleapis.com

offlinepages-pa.googleapis.com

clientservices.googleapis.com

www.googletagmanager.com

www.googletagservices.com

www.gstatic.com

Pi-Hole of course will not log IP address if the device does not query FQDN. No firewall running in my environment.

The problem blocking any of these could cause service problems. Only try and error can tell.

 

[mxnerd]

Google published it's own IP ranges.

Obtain Google IP address ranges - Google Workspace Admin Help

The default domain IP ranges used by Google APIs and services are allocated dynamically and change often. To get an accurate list, refer to these two lists that Google publishes and updates frequently

support.google.com

https://www.gstatic.com/ipranges/goog.json

 

[Red Squirrel]

Yeah some stuff won't work, like well anything by Google. I removed the block for now, will need to figure out the wifi situation better so that it stops thinking there's no internet. It would not be so bad except when it goes into the "no internet" mode, I can't connect to anything local, it blocks it for some reason. Can still connect to internet sites though.

 

[mxnerd]

What if you set a static IP for the smartphone but don't set a gateway?

WiFi Settings (dns,ip,gateway) - Apps on Google Play

By changing the DNS of your phone/tablet, you can access blocked websites.

play.google.com

 

[Red Squirrel]

Actually I wonder if it uses a different DNS server when it goes into "no internet" mode. That would explain why I can't access my local stuff if it defaults to a different DNS instead of my own. May have to experiment more with that.