Stop me if this sounds familiar (if it doesn't, you're not paying close enough attention). You walk into a coffee shop, where your phone hungrily gloms onto the open Wi-Fi network—probably called something like Netgear, or AT&TWiFi—and promptly stops working. The shop forgot to update the router's firmware, or just bought a budget hardware in 1997 thinking, "internet's internet!" and never upgraded again. Either way, your phone just invisibly sabotaged its own connectivity. You're standing six feet from where you had flawless internet, and suddenly the information superhighway becomes one giant roadblock. It's a small, but consistent (and infuriating) problem, and Google has finally taken steps to solve it. With the new Android 5.1 update, which began rolling out yesterday in the U.S., your phone will remember which networks you attempt to connect with have crappy Wi-Fi, and save you from ever hopping on their bandwidth again.

A few years ago, your phone's Wi-Fi-hopping strategy made sense. Your 3G network was probably painfully slow, perpetually overloaded, and generally battery-crushing. You also probably had an adorably small data cap, measured in megabytes.