If you explicitly turn off Wi-Fi on your Android smartphone before leaving the house to save battery life, you might be surprised to look at your phone an hour later and see that it has reconnected to a network at a coffee shop or your office. This happens because Android includes a background feature that constantly scans your physical location using GPS. If it detects that you are standing near a Wi-Fi network you have previously connected to, it automatically flips your Wi-Fi radio back on.
While this is convenient for users who forget to turn Wi-Fi back on when they get home from work, it is a massive annoyance if you are trying to force your phone to stay on a 5G cellular connection (perhaps because the office Wi-Fi is incredibly slow or heavily restricted). Having the operating system constantly override your manual hardware toggles completely defeats the purpose of having a toggle in the first place.
You can dive into your network preferences to completely disable this location-based trigger, forcing the Wi-Fi radio to respect your manual commands indefinitely.
How to Stop Android from Turning Wi-Fi Back On
You must explicitly disable the network-aware intelligence feature.
- Open the Settings app on your Android smartphone.
- Tap on Network & internet (or Connections on Samsung devices).
- Tap on Internet (or Wi-Fi).
- Scroll down to the very bottom of the network list and tap on Network preferences (or tap the three dots in the top corner and select Advanced).
- Locate the toggle switch labeled Turn on Wi-Fi automatically (the description will mention turning it on near high-quality saved networks).
- Turn this toggle to the Off position.
Your Android phone will no longer attempt to outsmart you. When you turn off your Wi-Fi, it will remain permanently disabled until you explicitly open the Quick Settings panel and tap the icon to turn it back on yourself.