I observed in a Hotel I am that when other apps trying to access the internet a pop-up appears that ask the iPhone user to enter the user id and password of the Hotel’s Wireless LAN. I guess it is some kind of redirect on all requests to protect misuse of the WLAN.
I have an app and it does use the NSURLConnection but I am not getting the pop-up instead it goes via the regular data network of the carrier. I removed the SIM to see what happens then and then the connection fails with an error “The Internet connection appears to be offline”.
I wonder whether this is because the NSURLConnection does not provide such a pop-up and this other apps (e.g. Safari, e.g. WhatsApp) use a different API. One the other hand I thought that might be what the documentation says is the “Authorization Challenge”. I have implemented those delegate methods but they are not called.
If someone with some experience on this can help me.
Search the documentation for the UIRequiresPersistentWiFi Info.plist key – there are some tradeoffs (users will get an alert every time they open your application if their phone is in Airplane Mode – doesn’t seem to be any way to turn that off) but that should force it to make the connection.