We’ve covered the whole how-to-keep-your-Wi-Fi-alive issue before on Windows Phone Central. It was first realized that some apps keep the data-connection channel open which then allows your Wi-Fi to stay on when the phone is placed in standby (screen off).
Then a bloke over at XDA Forums created an app to mimic that scenario and it worked quite well except for the fact that it appeared to play a dummy song in your music controls.
Jaxbot from Windows Phone Hacker has now thrown his hat in the ring with Keep Alive. It too is a homebrew app that does not require root, meaning regular ‘dev unlocked’ phones can use it but it uses a slightly different method. Instead of pretending to stream a dummy song, Jaxbot evidently has set up his own server which then keeps your phone connected—data is kept at a minimum as it is just using pings to keep the connection open.
We loaded it up on our Lumia 900 and it seems to work, assuming the server is up and running. That’s perhaps the one drawback with this method as it depends on an external server. The upside is you don’t have a dummy song playing so your player controls don’t pop-up.
We should note that before you run it, makes sure you’re connected to your Wi-Fi first. Our 900 ended up shutting off and going into a weird power-off state on the initial run but that seems to have subsided now with it working intermittently.
It’s a nice little experiment and worth noting if you’re into keeping your Wi-Fi on. We use it for our non-SIM phones and do like the functionality. Even for our SIM’d phones, it’s a good method to make sure the phone is being forced to use Wi-Fi over your 3G/4G data which has been an issue on some devices before.
Head to Windows Phone Hacker for more info and the XAP to sideload.
