Post #4929680 · Elektrine

2026-09-27 12:46 UTC

How is everyone dealing with Android 17's "Nearby Devices" change? It took me a while to figure out why many of my self-hosted services were intermittently failing to connect on my phone after updating to Android 17. I eventually figured out there’s a new ACCESS_LOCAL_NETWORK permission which means the “Nearby devices” permission is now required to access devices on the same network subnet. For an avid self-hoster, this can be quite a bit. I had my DNS configured so my public-facing server resolved to a local IP address when on my LAN. This meant that my web, immich, xmpp, NTP, jellyfin and DoH servers all resolved to a local IP address on wifi. On Android 17, it all broke without warning. No error messages. No asking for extra permissions. Just silent packet dropping. I’ve solved it by configuring my public-facing services to resolve to my external (static) IP address, even when inside the network. I couldn’t make any internal services resolve to the external address (SMB, CUPS etc) because they are (obviously) not bound to my WAN interface. I get why the change was made. A lot of apps were snooping around people’s networks to gather intel. A potentially massive privacy violation. Has anyone else had this issue? Is this the cleanest solution?

Replies (5)

@Lenna@piefed.ca 2026-09-27 17:22

I had my DNS configured so my public-facing server resolved to a local IP address when on my LAN. This meant that my web, immich, xmpp, NTP, jellyfin and DoH servers all resolved to a local IP address on wifi. I unfortunately don’t have an answer to your question since I’m not on Android 17, but I do want to ask about this part. What’s the benefit of this? Does it improve speed when streaming on Jellyfin?

Open ##4929679
@Joelk111@lemmy.world 2026-09-28 04:22

Why are permissions so damn confusing? I say this as someone who knows why permissions are needed, such as location to find nearby devices. But why must we keep track of “permission X is for thing unrelated to X” in our heads? Now I haven’t tried to make a permissions system for the masses, so I guess I can’t say too much, but it doesn’t seem that difficult.

Open ##4929952
@Crackhappy@lemmy.world 2026-09-28 07:55

Oooh. I haven’t updated it yet. Good to know as I will likely run into the same issue.

Open ##4937437
@frongt@lemmy.zip 2026-09-27 14:15

Why not just grant the permission to the apps? Relatedly, I think this is why Google Home and casting to Chromecast have stopped working reliably on my phone. Anyone figure those out? I’ve already tried granting permissions. Or it may be something GrapheneOS is doing.

Open ##4938715
@RickyRigatoni@piefed.zip 2026-09-27 15:35

My phone is still on 14 so uuuhhh I’m fine I guess?

Open ##4939745