Getting wifi access point established in Android?

General
#1

I have an XA 2 with Sailfish 4.5.0.24 and Android support freshly installed (first time install). The main reason I have Android support finally installed is because I would like to get the Nikon WMU app running to control two Nikon DSLRs I have. This normally works by the camera acting as wifi access point, connecting to said access point and running WMU (I’ve already been able to run WMU successfully on my spare Android-phone).

I got WMU installed just fine, and I can connect to the camera access point in Sailfish as well - but WMU cannot see it. When I press the wifi-button, I get the Android wifi dialog where only two of my other access points are shown as “saved” (really weird, as I have multiple access points saved in Sailfish, but only two of them are shown in Android). While the phone is connected to the camera access point, I cannot to anything useful in the Android wifi dialog - not even add a new access point, and the “use wifi switch” will always just flip back to “off”.
When connected to a normal access point, the Android wifi dialog is showing that access point correctly as connected, and I have been able to use it, too (otherwise, I could not have installed WMU in the first place). In that situation, I can at least add another access point by storing its SSID, so I added the camera access point - but unfortunately, that does not help connecting when I re-connect to the camera access point.

I’ve already been through the “known issues” document, but that does not seem to mention any issues related to wifi and Android (I’ve only seen something about Bluetooth), and a search in the forum did not really bring anything up either.

Any ideas? Or do I have to accept that this simply is not supported?

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#2

WiFi management isn’t supported in AppSupport - like Bluetooth, NFC and other similar things that SFOS itself controls. This should be a known issue. Come to think of it - i don’t know where that page you refer to lives nowadays - got a link?

You are way deep down in the details of some specific app though, so don’t hold your breath for help on that. It will depend on how much the app expects to be able to faff with WiFi management before it lets you move on.

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#3

First of all, thank you for taking the time to respond! The “Known Issues” have - according to the release notes for 4.5.0.24 - been split out into a separate document, which can be found here:

What gets me is that the app just drops me into the standard Android wifi set-up menu - nothing special there. And that dialog does not even show all the access points in the vicinity that are visible to Sailfish (even “normal” ones).

BTW: on an actual Android-phone, I only need to connect the phone to the camera-access point and the app can the detect the camera and communicate with it. Same from an ordinary Linux desktop - I can associate a wifi-interface with that camera-access point and access it using gphoto2.

#4

“Nothing special”, apart from that it is running in a container and not fully plumbed in to the actual OS.

As per your description it would seem the app still wants some sort of interaction with the WiFi management APIs (as opposed to pure network comunication), if only in the background, to get to that step.

Hardly “same” as it is a completely different application. I’m sure that if you got gphoto2 running on SFOS, it would work fine there too.

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#5

I think the question is why appsupport cannot use ad-hoc wifi networks.

As an alternative to WMU you can copy airnef files directly to SFOS and download your camera pictures using command line.

#6

Please define “use” and motivate why you say so.

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#7

Use as make use of the ad-hoc network in a similar way the host SFOS is connected to.

A classic example is IoT devices that during setup create ad-hoc networks to communicate with to finalise their configuration.

#8

Surely they can make use of the network as a network? What doesn’t work is WiFi various management APIs as per above. Your description isn’t at all clear on which of those you mean (or that you have established the difference). Are you really saying that if you ad-hoc connect to something, you couldn’t e.g. use a browser running under AppSupport for management like what you describe? Is there a bug report for that?

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#9

AFAIK Wifi ad-hoc networks (the Wifi mode as opposed to AP/Infrastructure mode, IBSS vs BSS) are not supported in SFOS at all. Or has that changed?

(That is, you can use iw and friends to set it up, but there is no UI and no persistence of the configuration.)

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#10

I don’t think the network/wlan connection as such is the issue here - when I connect the phone (just normally via Sailfish) to the camera-access point, I can ping the camera (as dhcp host) just fine from the command line. It’s just the Android part that does not seem to “get it”.

#11

Hm, maybe you’re right, though that dialog clearly has some interaction with SailfishOS - if I have that dialog open, then change “normal” access points in Sailfish, the new access point shows up just fine in the Android wifi dialog, and the wifi-switch stays on. It’s only with the camera-access point where that does not work. I’m wondering whether that has anything to do with the fact that there is no internet connection on that access point. If I’m bored at some point, I might just experiment with an old access point I have lying around to see if that makes a difference.

For now, it seems like I just have to accept that this does not work, which is a real pity. Would have been a nice short cut to remote control the camera with my Sailfish-phone and to get the occasional image over.

#12

So maybe something really has changed.
I have a Canon Selphy CP1200 printer here and I can print from a Jolla1 and Xperia X using the Canon-PRINT app via a Wifi-Direct connection.
But with an Xperia XA2 and Android 11 (Android app support) this is not possible. The Canon app always complains about deactivated WiFi.
Would you like to change that? A yes then leads to the Android settings, where “Use WiFi” is set to off. You can turn this on but it is not saved permanently. If you go back and go into the settings again, the switch is back to off.
Under Install Certificates there is also an item Wi-Fi Direct but it is grayed out-
(What I also observed is that the Canon app can no longer access the SD card on the Xperia-X (permissions are missing), which is still possible with the Jolla1.)
I understand that the Android support of Jolla1/Xperia X is fundamentally different to that of the XA2 and later. But, i would have hoped for an improvement with the newer versions of the ASUP ;-).

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#13

Ah, that seems to be pretty much the same behaviour as I get from the WMU app. Maybe I’ll dig out my Xperia X just to give that a try for giggles.