Android 12 is here in its first version for developers and little by little we are getting to know everything that will incorporate, if finally they are not discarded or parked functions, when it is definitively released for all audiences in the month of August.
We already know that it will improve security, compatibility with different audio and video formats and even allow updating the runtime ART from Google Play. But it also incorporates a much easier way to share the key of our WiFi with other users. It has done so by merging the WiFi sharing function with ‘Nearby Share’, and we explain how to do it.
How to share the WiFi key remotely with ‘Nearby’
Android already had a fairly simple function to be able to share a WiFi key with other users through a QR code, something we already saw, for example, in Android 11. But Android 12 takes a step further and has a way of share our key wirelessly.
We simply send our password to another user who is close to us a través de ‘Nearby Share’, the Android feature that seems to be the equivalent in the Google ecosystem to the iOS Airdrop. Android 12 incorporates this functionality and makes sharing the WiFi key much easier. No more “can you tell me your WiFI password?” what family and friends tell you when you get home. Now you send it and that’s it.
We tell you how to share the WiFi key with ‘Nearby Share’, including the part in which we give permission to the app to connect with this function. If you already have it activated, you can skip that little intermediate step. The process to do so is as follows:
- We open the ‘Settings‘of our mobile phone with Android 12 and we go to the’ Network ‘section to access’WiFi’.
- Once inside, we click on the right arrow that appears above the name of our WiFi, the one to which we are connected.
- Now we will have in front of the WiFI options with buttons such as ‘Forget’ or ‘Disconnect’. And there it will appear ‘Share’ with an icon of a small QR code. We enter.
- Now we will see the QR code to share our WiFI with other users, as we already saw in Android 11, but we have a new button just below the code called ‘Nearby’. We press it.
- The phones will ask us to activate ‘Share with Nearby ‘ to allow us to send the WiFi key to other nearby devices. We accept it.
- Once this is done (or if we have previously connected with ‘Nearby’) our phone will start looking for other phones Nearby with the ‘Nearby’ option available.
- Simply we choose the phone to which we want to send the password of our WiFi and voila, the receiving phone will automatically store the key and you can connect to the WiFi without problems.