Stop Android Oreo’s annoying ‘running in the background’ notification

Android Oreo introduces a new feature that lets you turn on WiFi automatically when you’re near a “high-quality saved network,” like one from work or home. This feature can be found on the official builds of Android 8.0 for the Google Pixel and Google Pixel XL, but it is not available on the Google Nexus 5X or Google Nexus 6P. However, that wasn’t always the case. The two Nexus phones actually had the WiFi automatic wakeup feature when Android O Developer Preview 2 was out, but for some unknown reason Google removed this feature in the final Android 8.0 Oreo release for the Nexus 5X/6P.

WiFi modules in smartphones these days are quite efficient when it comes to battery life so this isn’t something that will save a lot of battery life for most people. However, if you’re in an area with a ton of WiFi access points with varying network connection quality, then you may experience some battery drain associated with your smartphone constantly connecting and disconnecting from low quality, open WiFi networks.

That’s where the feature to turn on WiFi automatically comes in. What happens is that while the ability to connect to WiFi networks is turned off, the feature to scan for WiFi networks remains enabled. In the background, Google scans for networks then uses its own recommendation service to determine if it should turn WiFi back on to connect to the network. Google’s recommendation service bases this decision on whether or not the WiFi network is a saved network that you connect to frequently, and if that network offers a stable, high speed connection.

A pretty good feature. But it was removed for the Nexus 5X and Nexus 6P for reasons we don’t know, perhaps it just didn’t work that well for those two phones. As with many other Android features that don’t have a user-facing toggle, we can actually bring this feature back with a couple of ADB commands. So let’s dive into the steps required to get bring back the “turn on WiFi automatically” feature for the Google Nexus 5X and Google Nexus 6P.

Enable the “Turn on WiFi Automatically” Feature on the Nexus 5X and Nexus 6P

1. First you’ll need to have ADB installed on your desktop or laptop computer.
2. Connect the Nexus 5X or Nexus 6P to the computer, enable USB debugging, and then open up a command prompt.
3. Execute the following command into the command prompt: adb shell
4. Then execute the following command in the command prompt to bring back the toggle: settings put global wifi_wakeup_available 1
5. Lastly, go ahead and execute the following command in the command prompt to actually enable the feature: settings put global wifi_wakeup_enabled 1
   
   

Stop Android Oreo’s annoying ‘running in the background’ notification