(Yes, I know my phone is running an old version of Android. I am tempted to try GrapheneOS, on a new Pixel device, so that I am on Android 13.)

I run a WireGuard server, listening on port 53, to which my phone is connected the whole time, and my laptop connects “on-demand”.

One of the advantages of using port 53 is that, when using public Wi-Fi with a captive portal - where you have to hand over personal data to connect, usually - my laptop will sometimes bypass the login requirement, and let me use the Internet unhindered. Sometimes it works (great), sometimes it does not (acceptable; I am not expecting this to be perfect, since it depends on the Wi-Fi network’s configuration / firewalling).

Despite WireGuard on port 53, my phone, running Android 10, detects that there is a captive portal, and will not connect without me logging in. I guess that this is what most people want, but typically, I’d rather not log in. I’d prefer not to use a Wi-Fi access point which requires me to log in, than to log in.

But I am curious to see whether I could disable Android’s captive portal detection.

And I think I’ve got it working…

Apparently, there is a way of changing the captive portal detection settings from within the phone itself, but I have not managed to achieve that.

Instead, I’ve done it using the Android Debugging Bridge (adb), connecting to my phone via a USB cable.

On my laptop, I installed the Android ADB tooling with apt install adb.

I enabled ADB debugging on my phone. It was a bit convoluted, and consisted of:

• going into “Settings”
• going into “About phone”
• tapping about 10 times on “Build number” to enable developer mode
• going to “System” (in “Settings”), “Advanced”, and then “Developer options”
• enabling “Android debugging”

On my laptop, I could then start adb with adb start-server and then connect to the phone’s shell with adb shell.

Within the shell, settings get global captive_portal_mode returned null.

I set up a Wi-Fi network with a captive portal and, by default, the phone’s Wi-Fi settings showed that that was the case, and prompted me to connect:

Changing the captive_portal_mode setting to 0 should mean the phone ignores captive portals, so I made the change with settings put global captive_portal_mode 0.

I attempted to connect to the test Wi-Fi network, and the phone behaved differently, as it showed the state as just “Connected”:

So that was progress, and may well be success.

It still did not connect, but that could be because my captive portal setup was doing its job properly, and preventing connections.