[gxqoz]

I bought a new modem over the holidays. Xfinity required me to install the app to activate it. But their login system was broken. It was impossible to talk to a human over the phone because I had to go through the app. Really terrible experience. Had to lie and say I was cancelling to finally get a human on the phone to do this for me. Still can't log into their stupid web wrapper.

[racnid]

I thought I was going crazy when their website kept pushing me to the app and I couldn't find an activate modem link. Please, why? Why is this necessary?

[jareklupinski]

they probably do something like switch your device's wifi network to the one that the router broadcasts to set itself up

for an app with wifi permissions it's trivial, but there is no API to do this through a browser so we're stuck downloading an app

i probably would not grant full network permissions to an app anyway

[1over137]

Analytics probably.

[pbsb]

"Web wrapper". What a great way to summarize the problem. Thank you.