Samsung Galaxy S4 - How to set preferred Wifi networks?

[anony00gt]

So I'm always using wifi on my Galaxy S4 (Verizon). At work, there are two wifi networks available. One is my own private router, the other one is the public wifi from my cable company (Cablevision/Optimum).

Of course, I prefer to be connected to my own private router while at work (it's much faster and more reliable), but the phone always, every day without fail, automatically connects to the cable company's wifi instead.

Yes I know I can tell the phone to "forget" the cable company's public network, but that would be inconvenient because there are many places I go where the public wifi comes in handy. Sure I can manually connect to my router, but that's kind of annoying to have to do every day. Is there a way to tell the phone to connect to my router by default when it sees two recognized networks available? Or am I stuck manually connecting every day?

Thanks.

 

[MisanthropicScott]

WiFi Prioritizer seems to do the job. I just found it today, through a friend, so have not tested it very thoroughly yet.

https://forums.androidcentral.com/e...d=org.za.flash.wifiprioritizer&token=ddv7z_Ci

 

[Adam Demeter]

Just Googled this, tried the app...perfect. Had the EXACT same problem....and now it's solved. The app has awesome ratings, and seems to be the highest rated of its type. Very glad I found this, even though it's a year and a half later! lol

 

[Robert Emmerich]

Set up an account just to say thanks. My problem was connecting to 1 bar Optimum while in my house while my 4 bar home router goes unused. This really should be built in to Android as 75% of the time I'm on my home router and and 15% on Optimum. The other 10% being Panera, TGIF and hotels. .

 

[billw3]

Thanks, MisanthropicScott, WiFi Prioritizer also worked for me (seems to at least...just added yesterday).

As an aside, I did actually contact Samsung to ask if there were a native way on the device to set preferred networks, and got this reply (several days later):

"Unfortunately there is no preferred network list on the S5, so if the Optimum network is available when you are at home and if you were already connected to it, your device will not default back to your home network."

So thank god some enterprising techie fixed this for us! Maybe this is neither here nor there, but it's interesting how Android tries to exploit all the ways its OS gives users more control than users of iPhones have, and yet this absolutely most basic networking function has to be resolved by a third-party app. I know when I had iPhones, preferred networks were like "Duh, OF COURSE you can set a preferred network. What is this, the dark ages before Wi-Fi?"