How about captive portal check?

/e/ Smartphone Operating System
#1

When an android phone connects to a wifi network a check is done if internet is usable by that network. It checks as well if there’s a paywall installed.

For that it requests a special webservice and expects a http result code of 204. This service is provided by several google servers (connectivitycheck.gstatic.com for http and www.google.com for https). It is called “captive portal check” and implemented in com.android.server.connectivity.NetworkMonitor.

Even LineageOS (base of /e/ as i understand) does so. If /e/ is really degoogled it means that either these checkes are disabled or the domains are changed and the service is be provided elsewhere.

How is it done?

#2

What has been done to de-google /e/ is described here:


Google is still fallback solution but only if /e/'s servers are unreachable.
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#3

Thank you for the fast feedback.

I understand that a fallback is needed but don’t like that google is again used for that. And in fact /e/ shouldn’t be used either.

Maybe /e/ should switch CAPTIVE_PORTAL_MODE to
CAPTIVE_PORTAL_MODE_IGNORE to entirely disable that check?

(i have no clue if one can do so on a running system?)

#4

This

is the related gitlab issue (closer to the developers than the forum). Feel free to comment there, to bring your ideas into development.

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