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iOS 11 Will Prevent Your iPhone From Automatically Connecting To Unreliable Wi-Fi Networks (trustedreviews.com)
A new feature spotted in iOS 11 beta 2 intelligently manages wireless networks based on their reliability, learning to ignore those that are too far away to provide a consistent experience. TrustedReviews reports: It follows the company's Wi-Fi Assist feature which meant handsets would switch to a data connection when Wi-Fi networks became too slow. Naturally, users weren't thrilled with the resulting data usage issues, and it seems Apple is looking to do better this time around. This new feature will disable "Auto join" for any network which suffers from low speed issues or is deemed to be generally unreliable. Users will, of course, still be able to join these networks manually, but the change should prevent the frustration that comes from iPhones automatically joining networks users know to be inadequate. At this point, there's no way to know how well the feature will work, and there will undoubtedly be issues when it eventually arrives in iOS 11.
There's actually a very recent XKCD post about reliability of WiFi versus cellular: https://xkcd.com/1865/
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Nothing there suggests that users still won't get bumped to a cellular network should the wireless one be deemed to be slow / unreliable (what is "slow"? Is that configurable?) just that you have to force the connection as it has been flagged. Will the forced connection remain even if it is "unreliable"?
How about just a notification on the icon (like a ! ) to easily let the user know the connection isn't up to snuff for whatever reason? Then the _user_ can decide if they want to go on a (potentially metered) cellular network. This can have an configuration option (default off) that automatically does this should the user be on an unmetered plan.
Given the options of "pay and get the content (probably an add) quicker" or "I can wait a few more seconds for free" even iPhone users would probably choose the latter.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
so it won't work with most hotel wifi?
"Of course it will very very much.
Please enjoy here shopping and banking online."
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Eh? This isn't about you losing any control - you retain the choice to join any WiFi network you like.
It's about the OS not choosing to auto-join ones that don't work.
It doesn't. It joins known networks to which you've previously connected. You can also tell it to forget a network.
10 years without a UI update is EXACTLY what I would want in an OS. The whole point of an OS is to allow me to run software and stay the hell out of my way. Changing a usable UI just for the sake of changing it is just a learning curve nobody needs.