Vote for it on Product Hunt: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/wi-fi-login-for-ios

While just the first version, the goal of the app is to offer some of the same functionality in a more lightweight and standalone package that the Café Wifi app had in terms of resolving Wi-Fi captivity issues, such as in-browser logins and terms acceptance prompts.

If you’ve ever used Wi-Fi in a public place on your iPhone or iPad, you know how annoying it is to run into issues where your device says it’s connected to the internet but nothing actually works. — The “Wi-Fi Login” app can detect this, and will notify you even when your device is locked.

Notifications won’t work in all situations, but you can always open the app to instantly see a browser with the Wi-Fi’s login page instead of having to fumble with Safari or wait for iOS to prompt you.

The app is free, but to get unlimited notifications, there’s a one-time in-app purchase for $3.99 USD.

Download here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wi-fi-login/id1372426307?ls=1&mt=8&at=10l4JY

Topics and discussion will focus on freelance, remote work, digital nomad life, and travel, as well as great cafés and other places to work from in various cities and towns around the world.

Participation is possible not only via the web, but also through downloadable native clients for: iPhone, Android, Mac, Windows, Linux, and Windows Phone. — With these clients or the Slack’s website, you can accept our invitation and join the discussion: https://slack.cafewifi.com

Ten to fifteen years from now, it’s estimated that the majority of the U.S. workforce will freelance. Even today, more and more workers are “increasingly freelancing by choice” due to technological innovations and workforce evolution.

Cafés serve an important role for all kinds of workers by providing a destination for those who need on-demand work and meeting space. Connecting Café Wifi users through discussion channels provides a cross-platform interface to seek and share helpful and important information directly amongst others with similar needs, experiences, and adventures.

Be sure to login, say “Hello,” and claim your username. The Slack will continuously evolve in the future with the community’s needs and interests, but will of course remain true to its focus. Hope to see you there soon!

Last Fall, we first released Café Wifi for iPhone and iPad, and this Spring we released it on the web, too. — Now, we’re bringing you our first major update ever for iOS.

Aside from the streamlined interface and improved performance, simplified user-experience, and more, we’ve also added something entirely new: the ability to offer the seat(s) next to you and even earn money in-app wherever you’re able to charge for seats. Seats can also be offered to others for free at just about any café you check-in at.

Visiting cafés has always been a bit of a dice-roll in terms of seating, but now, you can request a guaranteed seat from other Café Wifi users. 🎲

The app has already helped users identify and tag remote work “hot spots” in over 2,000 cities and towns worldwide.

Now, we’re adding this “live curation” option to the mix, based on where people are actually working from, and where seats are actually available. You can either save time and/or discover a new place through a requested and guaranteed seat, or offer seats to others instead who are looking to do so.—Best of all, enabling of these new “seat finder” features in app is entirely optional whenever you want, and when you’re done offering seats if you choose to, that service disables automatically after you leave the venue! So, it won’t cramp your style.

Community-Driven Optimization

As mentioned, this v1.0.0 update brings a lot of optimizations to the app itself, but our focus from here is also increasingly on users like you and the community that’s developing.

Currently, we all work together to attribute spaces and gather data about their workability, but now we’re commencing working together to also share tables at establishments and cut-down on empty seats by offering for others to join us if we’re sitting alone.

In the future, our hope is that our platform will even further optimize your work experiences and remote-work lifestyle as a whole in entirely new ways.

We have big plans for the upcoming year, and hope that this update delivers some excitement about what more is yet to come. We’re bringing our in-development Android app up-to-spec now to match these features, too, and hope to have that released as well in the beginning of 2018. ☕️

To download the new update, visit the App Store, or: https://cafewifi.com

UPDATE (2017/12/15): This project is now part of the all-new Café Wifi homepage that will launch on Wednesday, 2017/12/20.

The internet is supposed to be a giant, neutral and fast network of interconnected stationary and mobile-devices. In reality, the quality-of-service you experience can vary greatly depending on your location, current Wi-Fi or cellular network, and/or the actual hardware and equipment between you and your requests’ destinations on the “world-wide web.”

Your phone has to connect to a local-area network, which then connects to a local ISP and its associated internet backbone. Then, through things like 🌊 undersea cables, 📡 satellites, and even microwaves, your request is delivered and from there (in reverse) a two-way “conversation” between devices becomes possible.

Computers and smartphones can be anywhere. That’s by design. So, where is the “fastest internet” in the world?

… The answer may surprise you.

We’ve gathered (with your help!) internet speed data and statistics from over 100,000 hotspot networks worldwide, mostly from users of the Café Wifi app checking-in at some of the best cafés, coworking spaces, airport lounges, and other “connected” places they’ve visited.

While Café Wifi can help you find the fastest network near you at any given moment, cities themselves can be harder to analyze as a whole. While some have some “spots” of super-fast Wi-Fi (such as at universities or well-wired office buildings), the quantity of fast connections is in-fact more important to everyone than the peak speeds in any given area.

When comparing cities with “giga”-bit to those with “mega”-bit, it helps to know which of the two is actually more accessible than just who is the “fastest”.

So, where is the “fastest internet” at?

Well. It depends on what’s accessible to you.

Most people don’t live at datacenters, nor are they connected directly to an internet backbone. While your local coffee shop could have “pretty good” Wi-Fi, or your cellular network might have “great” 4G/LTE, these are just one of millions (if not billions or near infinite) possible configurations.

Café Wifi today already does a great job of aggregating statistics down to the “café” (or “venue”) level, but what about cities? It’s harder to compare cities based not on Wi-Fi speeds alone, but also on the quantity of fast Wi-Fi speeds and their networks’ accessibility to you.

So… we built a thing: https://www.whereisthefastestinternet.at 🌎 — Please find us live on Product Hunt, and join in on the discussion!

Starting today, this “Where is the Fastest Internet (At?)” website/leaderboard of cities updates approximately once an hour based on activity from Café Wifi users interacting with the world’s Wi-Fi in nearly 1,500 cities and towns (already), worldwide.

Planning a trip and need to work? Moving cross-country, or feel like exploring? Research + compare.

We may do even more with this idea/website in the future, based on your feedback. 📩

If you’re not yet on the Café Wifi app, download it for free today to help update or contribute new cities and places with ease.

Stay tuned for more updates + Android app, coming soon! ✌🏻

We’re launching the Café Wifi Bot 🎉, and it’s available starting today on Slack, Facebook Messenger, and LINE (@cafewifi). It makes it super easy to search for places around the world to get work done, from just about any device.

Check it out on Product Hunt, and join the discussion: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/cafe-wifi-for-slack-and-messenger

While we’re hard at work on our soon to be revealed Android app, as well as major new upcoming updates to our iOS app, community features, and search website, the team often finds itself working with new technologies and gets to develop great new things while testing different systems.

The “Café Wifi Bot” is one way we can give you something cool while we’re between major updates and releases!

This conversational format is something entirely new, and not only lets you see a history of places that you’ve been, but also more easily lets you make plans with others thanks to common messenger features like group chat + message sharing/forwarding.

✅ Don’t forget to check out our native implementations on iOS and the web, and please feel free to recommend our new chat-based interactions to others on Slack, Facebook Messenger, and LINE (@cafewifi)! Stay tuned for more.

That’s right, an awesome, linkable web-based version of the Café Wifi iOS app (that you already know and love ❤️) is now available almost everywhere. 🌎

Give it a try! We’re hard at work on updates for iOS, Android, the community features, and more. Stay tuned, and enjoy the adventure. 🏄

Tag us with #cafewifi on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, + share links with us to places that we should check out! cafewifi.com

The growth has been phenomenal, and we can’t wait to bring you even more goodies and awesomeness in both future updates + on even more platforms. (Android users, we’re talking to you! *hint, hint*) — The goal is to satisfy everyone’s needs for being at 100% maximum possible productivity, conveniently, while outside of the more typical office environment.

Whether that’s helping you find a fresh and relaxing spot to focus or collaborate in, or delicious food in a place unfamiliar with power outlets and counter-seating galore, Café Wifi is the tool more and more of us need for daily work life “on-the-go.”

Today’s update

In our first big update, we’re introducing “deep attribution” for venues. This initiative is part of a more complex indoor mapping and feedback loop project for productive spaces, worldwide. If you’ve ever traveled to a city like Tokyo or New York City, you know that it’s not just about the single-level café or coworking space. Often, buildings bear a much smaller geometric footprint than elsewhere, and spaces can encapsulate or subdivide multiple floors of a building and exhibit all kinds of intricacies that are not commonly found in other more rural or “flatter” parts of the world.

Attributes can now be applied floor-by-floor in what are called “zones”, and zones can span both multiple floors or parts of a single floor. More on this below.

Some examples of today’s attributes:

• 🔌 Power Outlets (by seating type)
• 🚭 Smoking / No Smoking
• 🍗 Cooked Food
• 🌳 Outdoor Seating
• 🚻 Restrooms (inside or outside of the venue, plus ♿, 🚹, 🚺, 🚼, etc.)
• 🍎 Snacks
• 💰 Entrance Fee
• 🚉 Near To A Station
• 💎 Accepts Cryptocurrency (i.e. Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin, etc.)
• 🕓 Hours of Operation (by day, highly customizable)
• 💤 Sleepable (important to some of us!)
• … And much, much more.

With “deep attribution”, Café Wifi can help you find exactly what you need in a productive space or café (whenever/wherever you may be), and enable you to bookmark the qualities of your favorite places that you have already been to in the past, as well!

Zones & Clustering

For example, a neighborhood Starbucks may have a single-zone. Simple enough!

However, one in the city might have a separate upstairs seating area (2F), or no public restrooms available at all. Or, maybe it has outdoor seating, as well. All of these “zones” may bear several shared attributes, but then a few key defining ones may differentiate them.

Or, maybe you go to a multi-level coworking space….

Zones are highly customizable/flexible, but simple to view and create. For multiple spaces without physical walls, or even spaces with multiple rooms, floors, or even rooms that span multiple floors… there can be a zone or multiple zones for each.

Attributes can be moved and copied between both existing and new zones with ease, or edited and refined for other parts of the venue. Café Wifi will cluster together shared attributes between zones when possible, and help you get a better picture of where you’re going, before you get there… or while you’re already there for the day and want to move around. 🙂

Is there no Wi-Fi on the rooftop terrace, or is there music playing in the basement? Find the right spot for you! With this feature, we hope to create a deeper understanding of places.

Summary

Maybe you want to sit in comfy “arm chairs” or at single person tables, or maybe you need to have a meeting. Maybe you want to rent a private conference room, and need to know the pricing in advance.

Don’t risk your day, productivity, and happiness! Share the latest attributes about the places you go, and discover more in advance about where you are headed.

Download Café Wifi from the App Store if you haven’t already, and be sure to subscribe for updates here on Medium and via our newsletter.

Feel free to get in touch with us directly if you have any thoughts, questions, or feedback!