How To Enable “Turn On WiFi Automatically” On Nexus 5X/6P Android Oreo

Android Oreo introduces a plethora of new features. Among them, there is a very useful feature that lets you turn on WiFi automatically when you’re near a high-quality WiFi network like the one at home, work or the bar you have your morning coffee.

This feature first was introduced on the official builds of Android Oreo for Google Pixel and Pixel XL. Unfortunately, it is not available on Android Oreo builds for Nexus 5X and Nexus 6P. Actually, something strange has happened because we saw this feature on Android Oreo 8.0 Developer Preview 2 but for some unknown reason, Google removed the automatic wake up feature on the official Android 8.0 Oreo for Nexus 5X and 6P.

These days battery drain is such a big problem. Mobile data 3G and 4G drains the battery pretty fast so connecting to a WiFi network when it’s available is pretty useful. So if you’re in an area with a strong WiFi signal, why not connect to it?

Sometimes it may happen that when you’re in a place with tons of WiFi networks with varying quality, this feature comes in handy. If for any reason your device keeps connecting and disconnecting from low-quality networks you may experience some battery drain.

Here is how this feature works; while the WiFi is turned off, the service will scan for WiFi networks available and determine if the WiFi signal is strong enough so it can turn it on and connect to it. Google’s new service bases the decision whether the WiFi network is stable and if it’s a saved network than you can frequently connect and browse safely.

How to get “Turn On WiFi Automatically” feature on Nexus 5x and 6P

This is guide explained in detail and might be a bit long but if you know what you’re doing you can easily skip any step and go straightly where you need. I did explain everything in details so even newbies can find it pretty easy to enable “Turn On WiFi Automatically” feature on Nexus 5X/6P.

Early Preparation

Before going into the details of this guide let’s make sure you have everything it’s needed. Obviously, you need a Nexus 5X or 6P running Android Oreo 8.0. You can check the Android version if you go to Settings > About Phone.

Make sure you have properly installed ADB command-line tool on your computer. If you haven’t done it yet check our full ADB guide. Also, make sure to have an original USB cable. If you have the one that comes with your device, you’re good to go.

The last thing in the list but not the least, you must enable USB Debugging. If you don’t know how to do it follow these steps:

• Enable Developer Options. Go to Settings >About Phone > find the ‘Build Number’ at the bottom and tap on it repeatedly until you see a pop up saying “You’re now a developer”. Go back and enter Developer Options. Scroll down and find USB Debugging. Check the box next to it and you’re done.

How to enable Turn On WiFi Automatically on Nexus 6P and 5X

Make sure again you have properly installed ADB on your computer and enabled USB Debugging on your Nexus device. Once you’re ready, connect the device to computer using the USB cable.

Now follow carefully the steps below:

• Open a command prompt window. Click on run, type cmd and press Enter. A command prompt window will open. Execute the following command;

adb devices

• It will search for the connected devices and if you find your device connected go further.
• Run the following commands. Type each one separately and press enter after each.

adb shell
 settings put global wifi_wakeup_available 1
 settings put global wifi_wakeup_enabled 1

Basically, this is all. The “Turn On Wifi Automatically” feature is enabled and you can pretty easy access it from Settings options. Tap the ‘Network and Internet’ option at the top. Next tap on WiFi and then WiFi Preferences options. Toggle the option to enable the feature.

If you ever want to revert the things back to how they were even though there is no need to do that, you can follow the steps above from the beginning. Simply change the 1 value at the end of the last two command lines to a 0 and everything will be reverted.

By default, these flags were set to 0 and by changing them to 1 we get access to the Automatic WiFi feature on these two Nexus devices. So changing back the value to 0 will disable the feature you just enabled and remove the toggle from the Settings Menu on your Nexus phone.