Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We tried to implement something that matched the most recent iPhone version. So, game-theoretic evil?
Don't be evil but also morality is relative.
As long as we aren't the #1 most evil company, we're pretty fine
Simple trick to increase coverage: Lying to users about signal strength
171–180 of 184 posts
Re: Simple trick to increase coverage: Lying to users about signal strength
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bars really don’t matter. You can have full bars and slow to no internet. You can have one bar but relatively decent internet. Honestly kind of wish the signal display would go away and instead show me when I lose internet.
When you lose internet, you get a ! next to the bars (at least I have on my last few androids). Usually I also have no bars when I lose internet, but sometimes I've got coverage without data flow.
You should but you don't always
Re: Simple trick to increase coverage: Lying to users about signal strength
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
When you lose internet, you get a ! next to the bars (at least I have on my last few androids). Usually I also have no bars when I lose internet, but sometimes I've got coverage without data flow.
You can have full bars and no internet when jammed in a crowded space with full pipes. Just because the PHY is linked doesn't mean you have internet.
True, but brownout due to network congestion is not the complaint here.
Re: Simple trick to increase coverage: Lying to users about signal strength
#174Having no knowledge about this isn't there a possibility that this is innocuous, that is that there is some difference in how each provider, such as T-Mobile or Verizon, etc., send the data about how many bars are available such that it needs to be bumped by one?
Re: Simple trick to increase coverage: Lying to users about signal strength
#175Android users can enter *#*#INFO#*#* on the phone app's numeric keypad to open a diagnostics tool, which includes a submenu that shows signal strength in dBm.
It's handy for locating sweet spots and dead zones in my home.
Re: Simple trick to increase coverage: Lying to users about signal strength
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is usually for a good reason - dual sim phones are almost always “DSDS”, or “Dual SIM Dual Standby”. The secondary SIM, because it doesn’t need to make a data connection, parks itself on the lowest-frequency (and therefore usually lowest-bandwidth) connection it can find. Meanwhile, your data-connected SIM is busy trying to stream a video or upload your photos, so it’s using a higher-frequency + higher bandwidth…
> Meanwhile, your data-connected SIM is busy trying to stream a video or upload your photos You're making huge and incorrect assumptions here, no? This also happens when your phone is entirely idle... and it randomly changes if you sit still for some time...
Your phone is never idle. Open your adb logs sometime and you'll see that it's doing a ton of stuff all the time. Much of which involves a network connection.
So your phone is basically always doing something, and frequently sending and receiving data when you assume it's doing nothing. By design, radios hop around between channels as conditions change. Another device somewhere outside your house kicked off a big transfer and your device hopper channels to avoid interference. Random atmospheric conditions introduced new noise, or another channel cleared up. This is standard, normal behavior for WiFi, Bluetooth, cellular, and essentially every other type of modern digital radio.
What you're seeing is normal and expected behavior. Modern radios and operating systems are vastly more complex than you're assuming.
Re: Simple trick to increase coverage: Lying to users about signal strength
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bars really don’t matter. You can have full bars and slow to no internet. You can have one bar but relatively decent internet. Honestly kind of wish the signal display would go away and instead show me when I lose internet.
Yes, please! And while we're at it: Just surface the fact that connectivity sucks to applications (maybe even at the socket layer, by just closing them if there's not been any forward progress for a certain time), rather than showing me loading screens that'll never go anywhere for minutes. This would give apps that do have some offline caching the chance of falling back to that (looking at a certain green music stre…
It is surfaced to apps, but the "just detecting that connectivity sucks" heuristic turns out to be not all that easy to implement. There doesn't seem to be a better heuristic than "try and let the app decide if waited too long".
There are some comments here: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/systemconfiguratio...
Re: Simple trick to increase coverage: Lying to users about signal strength
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
When we visit downtown of our city, I get great data coverage. My wife, on a different model but same gen iPhone and same plan, gets nothing. Her phone shows three or four bars but her apps won't load anything. No idea why, especially since I'm the one who installs ad blockers and such. Her phone is essentially stock.
is it perhaps iPhone 16e?
15 Pro Max
Re: Simple trick to increase coverage: Lying to users about signal strength
#179A friend recently got a (carrier-supplied) phone and has been complaining about how it would often have no reception despite showing a good signal; taking mine to the same areas on the same carrier and doing a comparison, mine was indeed showing no bars on the signal indicator. The difference is, mine predates this stupidity, and I can also see the details in the MTK Engineer Mode app, which shows the actual signal s…
> taking mine to the same areas on the same carrier and doing a comparison Unfortunately I don't think it's that simple. I've seen one phone simultaneously show significantly different numbers of bars for two SIMs installed in it for the same exact network and operator . After a while they become similar... then differ again... etc. I have no clue how to explain it yet, but what I do know is that it literally makes n…
I also have multiple SIMs set to the same network, with sometimes a different amount of bars shown.
I guess the bars aren’t realtime but updates every x seconds? I summed no malice.
Re: Simple trick to increase coverage: Lying to users about signal strength
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel you. We have stellar coverage pretty much everywhere in NL. Heck, I was recently in a work video meeting in the car, not a single drop. The route included part of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afsluitdijk Yet, when we visit family in Germany, five minutes after crossing the border we are in a cellular dead zone.
Interesting to see you have a different experience. I'm not sure I would call it stellar. On the train route between Den Haag and Amsterdam, one of the busiest routes in the country presumably, reception is constantly dropping out. I'd love to be able to work on the train, but it's completely impossible if you need a network connection for anything. Perhaps the route being so busy is the cause of the connectivity iss…
But in NL all the trains have WiFi, no?