Wi-Fi Priority is a small app that does one particular thing: it lets you decide which Wi-Fi networks your iOS device will join. That doesn't sound like a big deal but in certain circumstances it is, and if you hit those regularly -- and you're maybe a little more techie minded than the average -- this is a good app for you.
The thing is, we don't appreciate just how good our iPhones alreeady are with Wi-Fi. Walk into an office, and if you've ever joined the Wi-Fi network there before, your phone will just join it again. If your meeting spills out into Starbucks next door, your iPhone drops the office network, and can pick up the coffee house's one. It's all safe, because you determine which networks you trust, your iPhone just remembers and acts on that.
However, iPhones are also stubborn about Wi-Fi. If it's got you onto that office network, it will hang on to it as long as it can.
There is one office we work in occasionally that has two Wi-Fi networks. Both are public, both are free and we do trust both of them, but one is slow, and the other is
excruciatingly slow. If you get on that second one, it's sometimes faster to phone a friend and get them to describe a website to you.
Unfortunately, the two networks overlap very much, and it depends on which door we enter and what way the wind is blowing which network our iPhones will glom on to.
What Wi-Fi Priority does is say "no, these are the networks I trust, and this is the sequence in which I will join them." So you can set up your iPhone with this app such that it if it sees both of these networks, it ignores the one we say is too slow.
You don't have to be running the app for this to happen: you run it once, and set up the networks one by one so that it has a list, and that list is added to your iPhone settings. It's a shame that you have to do it one by one. It's also just the very slightest bit more techie than it might be: the app asks for the network's SSID rather than its name. That's the same thing, but most users don't know that. It the needs your network password, which for us meant digging through 1Password, and then it needs you to tell it what type of security the network has, which it really should be able to detect without our help.
We have no idea what security is on these two overlapping networks. Presumably we could find a human being responsible for the networks and ask them, but we'd only get into a fight about why they're so slow. When all this is done, though, Wi-Fi Priority creates a user profile for your iPhone, and installs that with these preferences set.
Thereafter, it all works -- and that's good. Only, we feel this is a huge claw to scratch a tiny itch. What we've ended up doing is just telling our iPhones to forget the slow network entirely. It does mean there are patches in that building where we get no Wi-Fi now but, seriously, it takes us ages to notice because it's always been so slow.
Maybe our solution is a bit basic, and doubtlessly there are cases when you need more specific control. If so, Wi-Fi Priority could be just what you need.
WiFi Priority requires iOS 7.0 or later, and
costs $1 in the App Store.
Who is WiFi Priority for:
Technically-minded people who switch between many Wi-Fi networks will find this a handy tool.
Who is WiFi Priority not for:
Most iPhone users.
-- William Gallagher (
@WGallagher)
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