Apple IOS captive portal strange behavior

Question

Created Jul ’16

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Hello,

I'm the senior developer of an Wifi project that offers free public hotspots including roaming between locations in some cities.

That means, you can login on one hostpot after confirmation of some terms in one location and get a session for 24h for example. So even in an diffrent city your able to get connected without running the login dialog again until your session time is over.

Now we run into a bigger problem with our IPhone tests devices. For some reason the devices stop displaying the WIFI captive portal dialog what ask the user to confirm our terms before he gets a new session. Even if the user is assuredly not logged in nor in any activ session.

After a restart of the IPhone the captiv portal page will start to work again as expected. So far we could not figure out why this is happening.

Our only approch goes in the direction, that IOS may keeps stored networks what do not need a login in the first place (in case of roaming with an activ session for example). So even if a captiv portal login would be required later IOS would not trigger the dialog if the user reconnects – but this is just a a shot in the dark 😝

We could'nt proof that so far.

May somebody has an idea why IOS is stoping to trigger a captiv portal page even if the hotspot requires it? And why a restart helps?

Thanks

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Answer 1

guywithmazda OP

Jul ’16

Sorry, I can't help you, but I thought I would suggest that you might get more help by asking in the CoreOS/Networking forum.

EDIT: Although I guess your question isn't really programming question, so I'm not sure which forum would be best.

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Answer 2

tin331 OP

Dec ’16

hello OP,

We are in the exact same shoes as you.

The weird thing is, it does not occur to all Apple Devices, but to some.

We thought it has something to do with the "Security Recommendation" text that comes up under an open wifi network, but certain iPhones display the captive portal just fine even though the Security Recommendation text is there.

Others, like you mentioned, do not display the portal at all, or display it after a long delay.

Have you been able to come across a solution to this after all these months?

Thanks

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