If you had your Android phone for a while, you surely have many WiFi connections saved and you are used to have your phone connect to them automatically. But what if you are moving to a new phone? Or you have to give the password of your WiFi to someone else? Do you remember it? You probably have many WiFi passwords on your Android phone that you don’t remember. Well … you are out of luck. 🙁
Unfortunately this is the first (and hopefully only for a long while) non-guide; I call it “non-guide” because simply trying to Recover WiFi passwords on an Android phone without root it is impossible. I am making this guide only as a testimony as many try to find a way and there are many “guides” out there that claim it is possible, but … they are wrong.
Honestly I don’t know why the Android developers never implemented a way to get those passwords back; it sounds like a very useful feature to have. There are some Android manufacturers that partially compensate this lack; in those phones there is an option to generate a QR code for an existing WiFi connection, so your friends can just scan it and save the information on their phone; but it is just a partial mitigation and not an universal one available to all phones.
There are many guides out there that claim that you can simply install some specific file explorer form the Play Store; I tried many of them, but none works as advertised. Some other guide recommend using adb; but the functionality required has been removed in the last few versions of Android.
The only (not recommended) alternative to get WiFi passwords saved on Android
The only way is to root your phone, but I would not explain the procedure in this guide for some important reasons:
- it is very complicate and often the procedure change from phone model to phone model; if you do even a simple miss-step your phone will be bricked;
- it will waive the warranty of your phone; so if there are problems on your phone, even not related to the rooting process, the manufacturer will not provide you assistance;
- some apps may exploit the root access to do nefarious things to your data and phone.
You are free to find other guides on how to do root your phone. But I guess that if you are able to do it, you can easily find the extra steps to recover the WiFi passwords.
I am sorry for the lack of solution, but I think it is important you know it cannot be done easily.