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[SUSPENDED. see P.S. at end, any good way to deal with this suspended state?]

My phone have the grey wifi-icon problem, where you do not have access to internet.
Yesterday it was working fine, I changed nothing.
Usually it always connected grey and a few moments later it gets colored, but now it is forever grey...

I followed these tips from other questions that did not work:

  • turn wifi-off/on
  • turn air-plane mode on, wait 1min, turn it off (and wifi on)
  • forget/remove the wifi config and recreate it
  • reboot the phone
  • reboot wireless router
  • shutdown the phone
  • (NO) I got a tip to lower my router security from TKIP+AES to only TKIP, but it was working perfectly yesterday; so I will not do that for obvious reasons..

I can ping my phone from my PC.
I can JuiceSSH from my android into PC (intranet is ok).
I can do nothing internet related...

My phone is not rooted, should I?
My connection drops from time to time when I see "obtaining ip address" if I leave it on the wifi config page, but it was like that already before the grey icon problem..

Where I can see wifi log to try to understand what is happening?

PS.: my phone is working again, I did nothing either to fix it; my PC was connecting to internet while my phone not... now both are ok; I will keep the question as the problem may happen again and I wasnt able to track what caused and how to fix (if ever possible); just that it is not urgent for now... thx!

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  • Logs can be viewed wither with one of those "logcat" apps from Google Play, or using adb logcat from a connected computer. You might wish to check some of the other logcat questions on our site for more details.
    – Izzy ♦
    Nov 20, 2013 at 21:59
  • thx, finally I managed to see the adb logcat (required sudo to all commands..), now I need some time to examine and filter what is important related to wifi..
    – Aquarius Power
    Nov 20, 2013 at 23:05
  • If you could ping your computer then your phone's traffic to the internet was being stopped somewhere on your LAN. I'd take a look at your home network the next time this happens.
    – Mr. Buster
    Nov 23, 2013 at 8:11
  • @Mr.Buster I have a wireless router; my only guess was that some rule on the router internal firewall could be preventing the IP of my phone to connect to internet, as my PC was ok, but after checking I saw no rule; I am seriously puzzled.. Unfortunately, when I had a chance to keep the logcat on a file, I didnt do it, I thought the problem would bother me longer... so I cant even check just out of curiosity :(
    – Aquarius Power
    Nov 23, 2013 at 21:18

3 Answers 3

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Grey icons don't mean that you don't have internet connectivity. eldarerathis's answer explains:

It has to do with whether or not you've currently got a good connection to Google's servers for sync services and the like. From page 27 of their Android 2.3 Users Guide:

Network status icons turn green if you have a Google Account added to your phone and the phone is connected to Google services, for syncing your Gmail, Calendar events, contacts, for backing up your settings, and so on. If you don’t have a Google Account or if, for example, you’re connected to a Wi-Fi network that is not connected to the Internet, the network icons are white. I'm not really sure why it bounces back and forth between green and white sometimes. I've noticed it on my phone but everything works fine (I run CyanogenMod, though, so perhaps it has to do with that). It could also be that green means it's currently in the act of syncing, but the wording in the document is a little vague, in my opinion.

In the case of Honeycomb or Ice Cream Sandwich, the colors are blue/grey instead of green/white, but they still have the same meaning.

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  • Well, that is what happens here: if the wifi icon is grey, it wont access the internet. About "good connection", that is confusing, because it should be able to sync with a bad connection, just that it would be slow, but NOT prevented from connecting and syncing.. it must mean something else..; IMHO it means there is no internet connectivity, despite my PC was able to connect flawlessly :), but my cell phone could not browse internet but could browse intranet w/o problems.
    – Aquarius Power
    Nov 22, 2013 at 23:13
  • I get that the two are associated with regards to your issue, but what is probably happening is the reverse: something else is preventing you from connecting to the internet, which does not allow the device to sync to Google's servers and thus the icon is grey. While this doesn't help directly in your end resolution, I thought I'd share what I had found when I was having a somewhat similar issue so that you would know where to troubleshoot and investigate further.
    – filoxo
    Nov 23, 2013 at 22:47
  • indeed, thx; anyway I think I will only be able to track this again if the problem ever happens again; what is most puzzling is being able to access internet from PC at that time..
    – Aquarius Power
    Nov 24, 2013 at 16:32
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I was getting the same issue with my tablet. Grey icon for wifi and SSL error on my Chrome browser. No internet whatsoever, started happening when i tried clearing cache files on system.

I was searching and googling for answers abt this issue with my wifi, then I finally tried fixing it myself. This was happening to my Lenovo ideatab A3000-h, then I looked on every settings I could see, to check if there are any changes on anything. I was almost about to give up, then I saw the time was incorrect. I checked the system date and time and I saw it was set to 8am 01/01/09. I then set the right date and time (automatic setup via mobile network), then poof, everything went running again. I see my blue wifi icon now..

The other guys are correct, grey icon means that there was an error on google sync, and in my case, since the time was all messed up, the syncing part was getting confused. Grey Icon for wifi doesnt always mean 'no internet'. just means, syncing is not successful

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  • cool! btw I had to set my date/time manually as the automatic seems to not work long ago; I will surely look that first next time it happens :)
    – Aquarius Power
    Feb 2, 2014 at 1:44
  • I just joined so I can vote this up.
    – Rudy
    Aug 6, 2017 at 7:09
-1

After my suffering with a Android phone last week ... I found the solution is certain for the emergence of the network in gray .... which in turn prevents communication with the Android market---

The solution is very very simple and without any programs all you have to do is :

Only change to Moscow Time Zone... Then, change the device language to Russian Then wait less than a minute will automatically change the signal directly to the color blue then, return your phone as it was.

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  • Switching to "Moscow time zone" might help when in Moscow (but is unlikely to help in Wladiwostok, Sydney, or New York). Though, you might have hit some clue here: if your time settings are too far off, that might cause trouble with SSL handshake (and thus keep Google Services from connecting to their servers correctly). So adjusting the time manually could indeed help.
    – Izzy ♦
    Mar 13, 2014 at 16:03

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