How to make an Android tablet respect my wish to stay on a WiFi with no internet access?

8 points by stig

I have a Lenovo android tablet for controlling my Behringer XR12 mixer. I connect the tablet to the mixer via a Wifi access point built into the mixer. For obvious reasons this wifi access point doesn’t have internet access, and this is a feature: I don’t want to be distracted my messages or new email during performances.

So far so good.

There is one fly in the ointment. Periodically the Android tablet opens a browser window, in the foreground, trying to load the google.com front page. I have so far failed to find a setting that can make it stop doing this. Internet search have so far been fruitless. I only find articles aimed at folks that has the opposite problem: they want to get on the internet, but can’t. I want to NOT be on the internet, but I can’t make my tablet respect this.

Anybody have any suggestions?

What android version is it on? I’m assuming this has something to do with the internet connectivity check like the other comment mentioned.
If you can’t turn it off under normal internet settings, than you can maybe enable ADB in developer settings, then turn the connection check off with this ADB command:

adb shell settings put global captive_portal_detection_enabled 0

I found this on a Samsung help page so it may not work for your Android build. Worth a shot I suppose.

stig

Thank you! This sounds very plausible. That specific command didn’t work for me, but in developer settings I found an option to disable captive portal mode, so 🤞that does it :-)
- zk
  
  Good stuff. Please let us know if that worked for you! I’d be interested.
  - stig
    
    Looks good so far :-)
    
    Edit: spoke too soon! ☹️
    
    PS: In “About this tablet” the Android version is reported as “14”.
- keldu
  
  Shouldn’t the captive portal detection be purely for access into the network?
  Which might be without any connection to the internet again.
  
  It should be a different layer, but that does not mean it’s properly designed …
nogweii

I wonder if this is related to the internet connectivity check, and if you can change it to a different host. Then point it at say, a raspberry pi or your router.