AT&T Smart WiFi may end up costing you plenty

More information: It seems turning on Mobile Data Access completely confuses the Smart WiFi app. As a test I enabled Mobile Data Access while connected to my home WiFi. The browser immediately failed to load any pages. I turned off Modile Data Access, and although the WiFi icon was showing and the SmartWiFi app. reported being connected to my WiFi, attempting to load a web site in the browser, or update my email, produces a message "Mobile data is disabled. Connect to Wi-Fi network instead, or enable mobile data and try again."

Sounds like a bug in the Smart WiFi app. to me!

It's happening to me on the Samsung Galaxy 4

Smart WiFi works a little too well for me on my Samsung Mega at home, to the point that it considerably drains battery life if constantly enabled. Given that I don't want that I decided to disable the app and simply toggle WiFi manually. I'm rather "new" with AT&T and I'm becoming a bit dismayed with the bloatware hardwired on new phones and purposefully added with software updates. 

I recently got a txt that I was going over on data usage, and upon investigation saw my data usage had gone from about 120MB/month to 143MB in THREE DAYS!  When I checked where all the data was going, found it was AT&T Smart WiFi !!  I had never used it before a few days ago, when I got notified an update was available & downloaded it, as it seemed like a great idea to SAVE data.  WRONG!

I just uninstalled it (to the factory version) since apparently I can't just take it off.  Hopefully this will resolve the crazy data usage.

My son downloaded this app right before bedtime and overnight it ran up $60 in data overage charges.6gb OVERNIGHT! !!

I called At&t and of course the customer service rep treated me like I was stupid and tried to define for me what WIFI was...Needless to say they were NO help

I very recently bought a new AT&T LG G2 and have been enjoying the heck out of it and discovering its features. A few days ago though I noticed that the phone, which normally had a wonderful battery life, was draining very quickly and not charging as quickly as it had been. The battery even went into the red zone sitting in my pocket with WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth and even cellular data turned off, after having been on the charger overnight.

Searching for the cause, I discovered that the largest consumer of my cellular data, more than twice the next app, was AT&T Smart Wi-Fi. That led me to discussions in this forum that said the same, that this app that supposedly was to help you reduce your data usage could actually increase it.

I also found discussions on technical forums targeting this app as a battery drainer (aha!) saying that it kept waitlocks (which prevent your device from entering power saving mode) excessively.

I have turned off Smart Wifi and my phone is back to behaving as it used to before I enabled this "feature".

And one more thing...? I had noticed for a few days that my phone was running warm in my pocket and I was not using it. That has completely stopped since I turned off Smart WiFi.

What a pig...! Wish I could uninstall this thing completely. Looking into rooting the device.

It is beyond me why carriers pollute their devices with useless apps that even make your device experience worse! This is supposed to make us feel good that we have an "AT&T phone"? 😛

#bloatwarefail

Yes. Samsung Galaxy3. Battery drain, dropping home wifi (tipoff that AT+T "Smart" Wifi was to blame when a friend with a Samsung G3 on TMobile had no such problems with my home wifi). Smart wifi sucked up 1.83 GB of data in background usage in 7 days. All solved by removing the app entirely.