Android treats tinc connection over WiFi as metered

[danielb42]

Android seems to treat VPN/WiFi connections as metered unless the VPN app tells it otherwise. Most Android apps don't give the user a fine-grained choice about which connection types are allowed to use and so one can often only select if metered connections are allowed generally or not. Now I do NOT want to allow metered connections in most cases as I don't want to use my mobile data connection for, say, large downloads. But disallowing metered connections then also prevents the use of WiFi with tinc enabled as it is considered a metered connection.

Maybe you could look into marking the tinc connection over WiFi as unmetered, while leaving the metered property of the mobile data connection intact?

Thanks!

[pacien]

VPN apps seem to be marked as offering a metered connection by default.

I think it would be possible to add an option in network.conf to override this. This would allow the user to mark a particular tinc network as metered or unmetered for the Android system and other apps.

Would that be good for you?

(Automatically determining whether the VPN should be metered or not depending on the underlying connections seems tricky, because multiple ones can be used at the same time by the VPN. The Android API does not seem to allow changing the "metered" marker without disconnecting and reconnecting the VPN either).

[danielb42]

Hi pacien, yes I think that would be a good solution. Thanks for looking into it.

[pacien]

Starting with v0.36, the VPN connection will be marked as metered only when the underlying link is metered.