Have you forgotten the password of a WiFi network to which you had already connected with your smartphone? Well, everything is not lost since you can recover thanks to the record that is saved on the device. We show you how you can access it.
WiFi passwords are not always easy to remember. The most advisable thing is that they are not to avoid security incidents and that a well-known neighbor takes advantage of the weakness of that password to steal your WiFi.
If you need to connect another device and do not remember the password of that WiFi network, or want to share it with someone else, it is very useful to have it at hand. Luckily, your smartphone remembers it for you.
This configuration does not appear visible in the WiFi configuration, but there are some formulas to retrieve it and share it. We show you where to see WiFi passwords on your mobile.
With Android 10 everything is very simple
Some phones are already starting to bring Android 10 factory installed, have been updated in recent weeks or will soon. This is excellent news for those users who always forget the password since Android 10 allows you to share the password and connection data most easily.
We could see this function in the Android Beta, and it is presented as a simple way to see the WiFi passwords on your mobile since a QR code is generated that includes all the information of the Wi-Fi network to which Are you connected.
To access it you just have to go to the Settings menu and from there, enter the Networks and Internet section to tap on the WiFi section. All nearby WiFi networks and those to which you have already connected on occasion will be shown here.
Touch on the WiFi network you want to know or share the connection data and the Forget and Share options will be displayed. Tap on Share and identify yourself with your established fingerprint or security pattern.
Then a QR code will appear with the password and connection data of that network, and the password that will be shown just below if you want to use it to connect a laptop or any other device.
EMUI and MIUI also make it very easy.
Some manufacturers have anticipated the arrival of Android 10 by implementing these functions to share the access data of the WiFi networks to which you have connected.
Huawei or Xiaomi is the best example of this since the last layers of customization of MIUI and EMUI already allow to recover the passwords of the WiFi networks that you save on your mobile.
The way to access this information is practically the same since you must enter the Settings menu too, from the Wireless and networks option, access the list of WiFi networks to which you have connected.
Touch on one of them to see its details. Here, the QR code will appear that contains all the information necessary to connect to the network, so you only have to scan it with another device to see the password.
This does not have to be complicated since most mobile phones currently integrate Google Lens into the camera itself, so you won’t even need to download a QR code reader.
For the rest of Android, you need to have root access
Unfortunately, seeing WiFi passwords on Android phones before Android 10 is somewhat more complicated because it will be necessary to have superuser or root permissions.
In previous versions of Android, all WiFi network passwords to which the device was connected were added to a registry located in the system folders, so only users with special superuser permissions can access the wpa_supplicant file. conf to see what passwords were registered in a certain WiFi network.
Once these permissions have been obtained, simply install an app like WiFi Password Recovery on your device and activate it when you are within the range of network coverage you need.
The application will automatically access the registry of the WiFi networks to which you have connected and will show you your access data with an included password, also allowing you to create a QR code to share the data more easily.
You can also do it using a file browser with root permissions to open the WiFi password log file. In our case, we have used Total Commander to navigate to the route/data / misc / wifi. Here you will find the configuration file wpa_supplicant.conf.
Long press on this file to bring up the context menu of Total Commander and tap Open with to open it with the editor that includes the application.
Next to the network = commands of each register, the names of the networks to which you have connected and that remain stored on your smartphone appear, while after the PSK value = the passwords of those networks appear that you can copy to use them.
