Android will soon make it easier to connect to some public Wi-Fi networks

[phillynews215]

• Google is preparing to have Android open Captive Portal pages in an Android Custom Tab instead of an Android WebView.
• A Captive Portal is a web page that many public Wi-Fi networks present before they allow your device to connect.
• By opening these web pages in Android Custom Tabs, they’ll have access to your autofill and session data, making it easier to sign in when needed.

Public Wi-Fi networks are everywhere these days, and thanks to the proliferation of technologies like HSTS and HTTPS, are generally considered safe to use even without the use of a VPN. Unfortunately, some public Wi-Fi networks are rather inconvenient to use, as they might ask you to log in using a social media account or share some of your personal data. This wouldn’t be much of an issue if the Captive Portal — the web page that pops up when you connect to public Wi-Fi — had access to your autofill data, but it doesn’t. That could change soon, though.

The reason that Captive Portals don’t have access to your autofill data is because they’re opened up in the Android System WebView app. The Android System WebView, or WebView for short, is the system component that allows apps to display web-based content without taking you out of the app. Although it’s based on the same open source code as Google Chrome and several other of the best Android browsers, it doesn’t share any autofill or session data with them. As a consequence, when a Captive Portal asks you to sign into a social media account or input your personal data, you have to fill all those details out from scratch.




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