Do you know of something that could get my Android tablet to switch between two AP's in my house? When I change locations in the house, it will never change to the stronger one if it has even the weakest signal that it was connected to. I can't find any Android app that tells the device to "change to a new AP if it is stronger than the current one".
I haven't had an Android device for a number of years now but my guess is "no" from the device side unless you're going to go make your own custom firmware with Wi-Fi settings tweaked or newer Wi-Fi drivers which handle roaming better.
If your router and device support 802.11 k/v/r it can help, most likely the AP does unless it's particularly ancient and Android has supported all of these since 8.0. Ironically, lowering the AP's power can help too (it'll cause the client to see the farther AP as weaker sooner) but obviously that lowers overall coverage at the same time... so it's a tradeoff unless you're willing to deploy more APs to make up for the lower power. Make sure you're restricting advertised rates from your AP to not include the slowest/oldest standards as well. That'll make the client less able to hold on as the connection gets weaker and weaker. Like the power recommendation, this means at the fringes of your coverage you'll get "no connection" rather than "a bad connection" but it'll make the overall airspace healthier.
If nothing else works and you can't fix the client because you lack full control (or a reasonable way to update it) then you can still try falling back to steering clients via hints from the AP (if it supports it) just keep in mind it also may not work and also may cause problems with other devices which were working fine. Or you may get lucky, worth a shot if you've tried everything else first.
As a note: My experience comes from designing and fixing enterprise wireless deployments so if there are any tricks specific to low AP count environments I would be somewhat ignorant of them. The same could be said if there are more easily accessible wireless controls in Android than I am familiar with as, if there are, I still couldn't use them as different guests walk in each day and they all need to work.
Android tends to hang on to APs even if they're at a completely unusable signal level with no connection. Doesn't matter if fast roaming is enabled, doesn't matter if bss transition is enabled.
The only solution I've found is enabling the minimum RSSI feature on my APs, this forcefully disconnects any clients with a low signal.
Devices usually take 5-10 seconds to reconnect to the new AP after this happens, but will also sometimes will fail outright for a minute or more while Android insists on trying to connect to the old AP with a worse signal and keeps getting kicked off, before it finally gives up and connects to the stronger signal.
Raising the minimum data rate can also help, as long as none of your devices are really old and need them.
Yes. The proven method is to A/restrict data rates to just high ones and B/lower the transmit power of your AP so that your devices can no longer maintain high enough data rates after a given point and are forced to disconnect. I am almost certain the run of the mill stock firmware does not offer you this option. Look into installing OpenWrt.
Apart from that, OpenWrt now allows you to install and use usteer which offers a plethora of (802.11 standards-based) tools to manage client roaming from the AP side, including the APs exchanging information between themselves.
I use Fresh Tomato as the firmware on my router, but I don't see anything in the documentation about "usteer". I'll search for a different term. I'm sure they have something, because they have a lot of active development.
