I’ve got some smart home devices that need to be setup by another device on the same WiFi network, but it has to be 2.4ghz network. My modern android phone insists on connecting to the 5ghz network and so can’t complete the setup.
Currently, I use an old android tablet that only connects to 2.4ghz to get round this, but it’s clunky. Previously I’ve changed the WiFi network to produce seperate ssids for the two bands, but I’d rather not have to switch these settings around everytime I need to modify something.
What I want is a system setting in android or an app that forces my phone to turn off its wireless N capabilities and only use the 2.4ghz band. My searching and reading stackoverflow posts suggest this just isn’t possible, but surely that’s not true?! It seems like a simple enough option to have!
Tldr : how to force my phone to connect on 2.4hgz WiFi rather than 5ghz
I don’t believe you can do it natively. However, I have managed to convince my phone to swap from slow 2.4GHz to 5.2GHz by using the Fritz! Wlan app, which exposes some more WiFi control.
I can imagine recent Android versions having patched that out, though. WiFi permissions are usually only granted to system apps these days.
I believe there’s also an ADB command line way, but I don’t remember it. Furthermore, you could try looking into developer options to see if there’s a toggle in there, or perhaps a method to select the WiFi country so you can pick one that won’t connect to your 5.2GHz band.
As long as the SSID and password are the same, and both are routed to the same network, IoT apps shouldn’t struggle to connect, though. You can try temporarily disabling 5.2 GHz in the router but I kind of doubt that it’ll fix your problem unless you have a really uncommon setup. Even with my weird guest network setup, cheap tuya IoT seems to connect just fine. Tuya all goes through the cloud anyway.