Better Support for Tethering to Phones

Hello Everyone,

First of all Volumio is great, love it, I use on a Raspberry Pi 3 B+ and 7" touch screen, to listen to music at work…which leads to this post.

Since I’m at work, I cannot connect the Pi to their network, so I use my Android phone as the internet connection. I set up the Pi to use USB tethering and I’m using the Volumio touch screen interface. It works OK, but what I would really like is if I could just use the Raspberry Pi standalone, ditch the 7 inch touch screen, and use the Volumio Android App to control it. The problem is, it won’t get anywhere because it’s not connected to a Wi-Fi network.

So the next thing I tried was just hitting the webpage. I figured out the IP address the phone assigned to it, and tried to hit it from my phone’s web browser but it redirects and just hangs with a forever spinning circle. If I connect the Pi and my phone at home to the same network and do any of the above they both work just fine.

While I could turn on my phone’s Wi-Fi and connect that way, I would prefer not to do that for a lot of reasons and USB tethering works great for providing internet. I’m not sure using my phone’s Wi-Fi would be any better anyway.

So I can use the touch screen and get internet through my phone and that works fine, but it would be really nice if either of the above options worked. I would really like to use the Android app, but since it doesn’t work, I have no use for it.

I’m not sure if it’s just me who has this use case or if there are any others, but it would be great to be able make this work.