Captive Network Login Still Broken in 2024

"Captive Network Login" has been fundamentally broken for at least 7 years.

It is not "user error" or a "hotspot configuration error", it is a bug in Apple's code that hundreds of people have officially complained about.

Any time you connect to a public wifi with a captive network page there is a chance that the next day you will not be able to access the internet despite http://captive.apple.com/hotspot-detect.html reporting "Success".

It used to be you could work around this in several ways.

There used to be a checkbox in network settings / proxies that would allow you to "Disable Captive Portal" for a specific connection. This no longer exists.

captive.apple.com popup comes up with bla… - Apple Community

There used to be a cache setting in your library you could delete to force a clean reconnection (~/Library/Caches/com.apple.CaptiveNetworkAssistant). This no longer exists.

Captive Portal at Public Wifi Spots not L… - Apple Community

You used to be able to open the Capitve Network Assistant app directly to force a connection. This no longer works. (`open -n /System/Library/CoreServices/Captive\ Network\ Assistant.app` does nothing at all now.)

wifi not working - captive portal login s… - Apple Community

Rebooting, forgetting the network, or booting into safe mode seemed to work at different points in the past. None of these works anymore.

wifi not working - captive portal login s… - Apple Community

The only thing that works is waiting for 24-48 hours for whatever hidden cache value is telling http://captive.apple.com/hotspot-detect.html to report "Success" incorrectly to expire.

This occurs on multiple different public hotspots and appears to be occurring with different router types.

(I seriously doubt Starbucks uses the same model of router for all of its hotspots as some local bar owner bought off the shelf at Best Buy.)

There are literally hundreds of users who have complained about this in dozens of threads going back several years.

There are undoubtedly thousands more who have encountered this issue and didn't officially complain.

The root cause seems apparent.

http://captive.apple.com/hotspot-detect.html will report "Success" even when the network is in a non-signed-in condition that causes apple.com itself to be unreachable.

Every known workaround to this has been systematically removed over the years, ironically likely in an attempt to "fix" the issue.

This bug is incredibly forward-facing and will be largely undecipherable for the average user.

They will just know that wifi "breaks" a lot more on Mac than on Windows.

Is there any actual recoruse for moving this issue forward? It is very annoying as my cell tether does not always work for VPN and there are times I am locked out of my corportate network because of it.

It is doubly annoying as I know the bug that is causing it, how long it has been around, and that if I was not using a Mac it would not be happening.

Christoper W.,

WA

Registered Apple Developer Since 2005

[Edited by Moderator]