You know the situation for sure, and sometimes you’ve been to it. You are in a familiar place (with friends, in a pub, in a club, at a train station), your phone is automatically connected to WiFi thanks to an earlier password and someone will ask you for the password . You most likely don’t remember him, so you’re looking for another way to come to him. The Android system itself from version 10 allows sharing the connection to WiFi via QR code, and some extensions from various manufacturers can do it for years. Therefore, access sharing will not be such a problem. But what if you really want to know the specific form of the password? Due to system settings, it is not possible to display it under standard circumstances. It is time for alternative methods to find out the WiFi password in Android. We bring you three of them.
How to find the password to a well-known WiFi network in Android?
1) By reading from the QR code
As mentioned above, it is quite possible that your phone has the ability to share a connection to a known WiFi via a QR code. In pure Android 10, this feature is directly part of the system , owners of Xiaomi, Samsung or Huawei mobile phones have known it for a long time. By reading the QR code, the network information is transferred to the recipient’s mobile phone by default and the connection starts. But if you want to find out the specific form of the password, you have to go “deeper” . The QR code is by no means a complex or encrypted carrier of information, so it is quite easy to find out what it contains. It was actually developed for this.
Take a look at the network settings in your mobile phone and try to find a button to open the QR code for a specific WiFi record. Once you have it on the screen, take a picture of it. Then go to any website that allows you to read QR codes (for example, ZXing ), where you can get the necessary data from the image. In addition to the SSID (name) of the network, you will also see the password for it.
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2) After the root of the mobile with a special application
If you are unlucky that your phone cannot work with the above QR codes for connection sharing, the situation is much more complicated . You can’t just access WiFi passwords in the system, even if they are stored in memory. You need a root phone to find and read them . Then you can either find all the passwords in the appropriate folders, or simply leave it to a special application such as WiFi Password Viewer. This is, of course, a much more advanced procedure, and the user would have to have a very good reason to want a specific WiFi password in order to access something like this.
3) By entering the router administration
This is a variant that requires a little luck . And it allows you to do much more than just find out the password. Even from a mobile phone, you can usually access the administration of the WiFi router to which you are connected. All you need to know is its basic IP address (typically 192.168.0.1 or 192.168.1.1, depending on the brand), where you will find access to the administration of the entire device. If the owner has not set his own access data (which is a big, but still very common risk), you can usually log in by entering the word “admin” in the username and password field.
If you are lucky and the owner has not changed the access data, you can easily get to the router administration . There you have the option not only to display the password, but to make virtually any network and permission modifications. Keep this in mind when setting up your own router.
