WIFI High Performance Widget

About WIFI High Performance Widget Android App

This is a widget to enable/disable WIFI high-performance mode on selected devices. In other words, by using the widget, you can effectively disable the Power Management in the WIFI driver of the phone/tablet. While certainly, it would drain more power, there are some advantages as well:

1. Lowering latency. If the wifi driver does not sleep, the AP does not have to wait until delivering the data. This is desired is many situations, like IP VOIP calls via WIFI, audio streaming, networked games (lower latency means better experience).

2. Ensure wifi is running put into higher PM state even when the screen is off. Again, this helps when you do VOIP calls, stream audio, etc.

3. Solving sporadic/unreliable connectivity problems. Root cause: Some older WIFI routers can't reliably communicate with devices using WIFI Power Management (they may actually sleep, when the AP wants to send data). It helps when your WIFI can connect to the Access Point, but the transfer is either very slow or unreliable (high packet loss). This widget does NOT help, if you can't connect to the WIFI Access Point at all.

4. Simply speed up download transfer rate. YMMV.

The widget should work on all devices with Android 3.1 and higher. In addition, this was tested and found to work on Samsung Galaxy S II (even with GingerBread).
Some users reported this also works with Acer Iconia and Galaxy Tab. Other devices may or may not support this feature. Please see for yourself. Please leave comments/rating if it helped.

USAGE: Add the widget to your home screen and tap on it to enable wifi and to activate/deactivate the high-performance mode. If you don't see the widget, start the activity. The widget should be properly listed afterwards.

Automatic toggle feature works using the following ruleset:
1. If Wifi connection is lost or manually disabled/disconnected, the HighPerformance mode will automatically be disabled (if it was enabled) to save battery.
2. If you reconnect to the last connected network, the last applicable state of the HighPerformance setting will automatically be restored.
3. If you connect to a different network than you had been previously, HighPerformance mode will be enabled based on the preference setting in the Application (whitelist)

Notice: While the READ_PHONE_STATE is indeed a very powerful and dangerous permission, I am not using it for anything else than to know if there's an incoming or outgoing call to be able to use it as a trigger. Nothing else, really...

If you'd like to double-check whether this widget has really done the job on your phone, you can try the following:
1. PING your phone from you computer with disabled wifi performance mode. Make note of the average round trip time. In my case case this was around 50ms
2. PING your phone from you computer with ENABLED wifi performance mode. In my case the average round trip time shortened to about 2-3ms. If there's no significant different between the two cases, chances are your phone does not support WIFI High Performance Mode.