Tell Your Phone to Shut Up About Joining Wi-Fi Networks
Welcome to Pogue’s Basics: little tips to help you survive in a technological world. Nobody tells us these things when we first start using a new phone, tablet, gadget, email system, or social network. Or if they do, we forget. So here’s your refresher course.
Your phone is only trying to help.
Every time it senses that you’re in a new Wi-Fi hotspot, it interrupts whatever you’re doing with an announcement like this one:
It’s looking out for your Internet needs, and that’s great. But it can get annoying if it keeps popping up while you’re trying to do something on the phone — type something, dictate something, defeat aliens.
Fortunately, you can tell the phone to shut up — to stop offering the names of Wi-Fi hotspots it has found.
iPhone: Open Settings. Tap Wi-Fi. Turn off Ask to Join Networks.
Android: The steps on Android vary by phone, because different phone makers put their own twists on Google’s basic operating system. But in general, it goes like this.
Open Settings. Open Wi-Fi. Tap the key or button that opens menus; tap Advanced. Turn off Network notification.
On some phones, like the one shown in the video above, the sequence is simpler: Open Settings. Under Wireless and Networks, tap Wi-Fi. Turn off Network Notifications. (On some phones, you don’t see the Network Notifications option until you tap the Menu button, the Advanced button, or both of those buttons in sequence.)
From now on, your phone won’t bug you about new Wi-Fi networks it finds. If you want to hop onto a new network, you’ll have to do it manually, on the Wi-Fi page of your phone’s Settings app.
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Adapted from “Pogue’s Basics,” Flatiron Books. Coming Dec. 9, 2014.
