So this article is about an App that I made for JioFi Devices and it is called JioFi Manager. Let's first talk about, What JioFi is? JioFi is a mobile hotspot device to which you can connect your wireless devices and access the internet. It is only available in India and provided by a telecom company JIO owns by Mukesh Ambani.
A Little Backstory
I own a JioFi for about 2 years now and made this app about a year ago. The device itself is pretty nice, it can connect with up to 32 devices wirelessly and has a battery backup of around 8 hours which is pretty decent.
What made me realized that I need to make an app for it?
Every time I wanted to check the battery of the device or wanted to check who is connected to it, I had to open a browser go to the router's admin page and log in to the website. It was not the most fun thing ever. I needed a way to easily check these important details about the device, a way to monitor who is connected or when to put the device on charge. and with the crappy UI of the admin page of the device, I didn't like it at all.
Then came the idea of an app. I started searching Play store for an app that can solve this problem. And luckily I found an app that worked! Kinda. That's the thing it worked, but, it also had a crappy UI and it was full of ads. Like every time I clicked on something a full-screen ad showed up. I got annoyed. I understand it's a free app and ads can pay the developer for the work they did, but overdoing it is pretty lame. Also, the app had like 100,000 downloads and that's when I realized that a lot of people need a better solution for this. So I said, I am gonna do it myself.
How I made the app?
I was still learning android when I made this app. And there were a lot of things that went wrong, so many frustrated hours sometimes even days when I couldn't figure out something. Initially, I wanted to make it simple add only a few functionalities like showing battery percentage, number of connected devices and a few other things. But as I kept making it find out a lot of cool new ways to do more things like changing WiFi password, getting mac addresses and IP address of connected devices. So I added all the basic functionality that I wanted and made the first version. So after I made the first version I wanted to add support for more of these devices (Yes there are more of them), at that time there were only two of them and I wanted to make this app support as many of them as possible. So I got another one of these an older version of JioFi and added support for that.
Now the app was ready. Even though it wasn't the most stable app out there or had an amazing UI it was still better than the official way of doing things plus I made it myself so that was another reason to use it (Just feeling proud). That's how it was born.
What can it do?
Now, after a year of the launch, It supports 3 versions of JioFi out of 4.
- JioFi 2 (M2S)
- JioFi 3 (JMR540)
- JioFi 4 (JMR1140)
It can change the password of the WiFi, show a list of connected devices, show battery level, how much data is used and lot more. In my opinion, it has the best UI of all the other apps available and it is very stable with 1% crash rates. Here are some of the screenshots of the app.
JioFi manager is only available in India since it is only sold here. If you wanna download the app here is the link.
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