EdgeWise Connect

@jakemor It's a "bonding VPN". We use the VPN API to act as middleman on your traffic, and then we make VPN tunnels on both your Wi-Fi and cell. This lets us pick, packet by packet which connection to use for your traffic. If Wi-Fi is good we use that, if the Wi-Fi is not good ( < 3 Mbps or so ) then we'll use both Wi-Fi and cellular to smooth over the problems.

@jakemor @alexgizis This is a cool implementation to resolve the issue, but I *swear* this was/is built in to iOS?

@jakemor @sam_ayres They had a "Wi-Fi Assist" feature. But it didn't work: if it saw a wifi not working well, it would stop using it for a long time without telling you. So if you took your trash out, while you were outside it would decide that your home wifi was terrible and stop using it. then you'd go back in the house and you'd be stuck on cellular for hours. We'll keep testing the non-working wifi so that we see the moment it starts working again to use. And it didn't do anything to move your connections between wifi and cell without say hanging up on voice calls and interrupting downloads.

@jakemor @alexgizis Yeah I remember turning it off because it was pretty terrible, nice work I'll definitely give your implementation a try!

@alexgizis I can see there's a VPN icon on my screen after installing the app, why is that?

@alon_keren The way it works, it's actually a bonding VPN. It uses the VPN API to act as middle man for your traffic, and then it has connections on both the cellular and wifi, so it can pick whether to use wifi or cellular from moment to moment.

@alon_keren One of the engineers is a passionate bird watcher, and generally quiet guy. When talking about mission and who we want to be, he launched into a passionate pitch for Project SNOWstorm, and the fate of the snowy owls. It was surprising and beautiful, and when he was done it was clear we'd found our cause. SNOWstorm is a great organization and we're happy to be donating to them to support their work.

@alexgizis This seems like a great idea! There’s always a pain point between going from WiFi to data and it especially becomes onerous if I’m in the middle of work or a video call. This could be a great solution to try, nice build! Plus, I love that a certain percentage goes to a good nature cause. 👍🦅

@pregenun Yes, we were working on this when 1.1.1.1 came out... honestly, when we saw 1.1.1.1 was basically the exact same, except the location of the menu button, we started wondering if they had figured out something important about menu button placement. So we moved our menu button to the centered bottom just like they had it, but it didn't seem right at all, and we put it back to the top where we had put it in the first place. EdgeWise will come to Android... we have the whole core engine running on Android, it's missing the user interface. But as we did keep the interface one button, that's not much of an excuse.

@alexgizis hahaha great to hear!

@zelena Yes, what happen is that it will use little bits of cellular (sometimes just for a second or three) to fill in the gaps as your phone switches from one Wi-Fi to another.