Enabling Hotspot on a Rooted Sprint Galaxy S6

Published August 30, 2015 on Chandler Swift's Blog Source


While the transition from my S4 to S6 has gone generally smoothly, I do miss the lack of support for the Xposed framework; specifically, the ability to create a wireless hotspot. However, there is a simple fix, with very little technical knowledge required (taken with gratitude from a post buried on xda-developers):

Prerequisites

  • A rooted phone. Samsung’s Galaxy S6 and Note 3/4 are known working, but it should work on most phones with recent versions of Android.
  • An app called SQLite Editor. It’s available on the Play Store for $2.99 (at the time of writing), and I gladly paid it. If you insist on not paying, you can probably find it free online, but be careful what you install!

Abbreviated Steps

  • Open SQLite Editor.
  • Select Files from the top menu.
  • Find /data/data/com.android.providers.telephony/databases/telephony.db
  • Select carriers.
  • Find APN2LTE internet and APN2 EHRPD internet, which should be the last two lines.
  • Change the type field from its default default,mms to default,mms,dun on both lines.
  • Reboot.
  • Enable your device’s native hotspot!

Comments

Wow. Coming from the S4 (Latest CyanogenMod nightly), the S6’s built-in hotspot is absolutely incredible. I came from having controls for AP name and Password, to an array of controls that nearly puts my router to shame. Beyond the usual, the new native hotspot (Android 5.0):

  • Lists connected devices
  • Allows for MAC Address filtering (Whitelist)
  • Allows configuration of the channel (frequency and band)
  • Allows control of IP addressing: Subnet, etc.
  • Allows fairly fine-tuned control over DHCP settings: IP range, etc.

Also, if the phone cannot connect to the internet, it (as far as I can tell) assumes that tethering is disabled for your account, which causes a potentially misleading notice to appear.

Full walkthrough

Select the files tab: step 1

Select data: step 2

Select data again: step 3

Select com.android.providers.telephony: step 4

Select databases: step 5

Select telephony.db: step 6

Select the table carriers: step 7

Find the lines starting with APN2: step 8

Change default,mms to default,mms,dun as shown: step 9


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