I'm not sure what you're talking about. I've used Chinese SIM cards in my Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 5 and didn't have any issues, even though the "no network" symbol with the "x" on it showed up over the LTE connection symbol. The real issue occurs when you use a foreign SIM and try to get on WiFi. When you get on WiFi, the phone will connect to it, but will think it has no internet connection. In order to force it to use the WiFi, you have to swipe down from the top and click on "Mobile Data" to kill the LTE connection (which forces it to use the WiFi) and THEN you turn on your VPN. And when you leave the WiFi coverage area, you have to do the reverse to disable VPN and re-enable LTE. Extremely annoying. I was thinking of getting a VPN router for my wife's parents' house just so I don't have to deal with this crap. And I've complained Google about this for the past 3 years and they just don't seem to care.

I think you're misinformed. When you enter China with a valid visa in your passport, you are allowed to go anywhere, so you could have fled off to a rural area. But when you enter China on TWOV, you are not allowed to leave the city in which you entered/are leaving from. No one's doing a border check at the city/province limit to make sure you don't, but that's technically against the rules. Therefore, you only have 24 hours to register. Now for a 1 night trip where you're crashing at a friend's place, and departing the next day at a time earlier than you arrived, you legitimately could have been partying all night at local bars/clubs, but anything longer and they'll know you broke the rules.

All of the 72/144 hour zones include an abundance of rural lands.

I was under the impression that the entire area encompassed by the provincial level cities of Beijing/Shanghai was considered urban. Actually, what is the definition of a "rural area" in China? In the US, it's any place outside of an incorporated area with a population of 2500 or greater (I am not sure how this affects places like Maui County, which only has administrative divisions down to the county level AND has a population of > 2500 for the entire county).

Irrelevant. The Beijing TWOV area includes Tianjin (another provincial-level city) and Hebei province....and there are definitely rural areas in the latter which would fall under the 72 hour registration rule rather than the 24 hour. (Whether those would be places a tourist would want to stay at, is a separate issue). The Shanghai TWOV area includes all of Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces...ditto. So if we're speaking hypothetically with respect to breaking TWOV rules and crossing to another zone, it could be possible to dodge registration. Such as enter at Shanghai for 144-hour TWOV, take a train to Beijing, sightsee in the afternoon, spend all night partying or at one of those late spas like No. 8 Hot Springs, sightsee next day at Great Wall, stay out in some remote village (with a friend, etc) for less than 24 hours, back to Beijing for train back to Shanghai next day.

I don't recommend doing this since it is against regulation, the train journeys are trackable, if any authority wants to bother with following your movements, and it would be exhausting. Needless to say, anybody trying this would be wise to book and pay for a hotel/hostel in the Shanghai region AND show up to register before sneaking out of town. This serves as "insurance" so that you are seen in a database as registered, even if your goal is to physically be elsewhere. Because when you try to exit China and the database pops up, and there's no record of you registering anywhere, the questions may start. Note that this "insurance" is likely to end up being as expensive as just getting a Chinese visa to begin with, and staying completely legal and not having to look over your shoulder constantly.

Beijing and Shanghai are 5.3 and 2 times the size of Rhode Island, and it's possible to get pretty remote in both cases. But, even if this weren't the case, the Beijing 144 hour TWOV zone includes all of Hebei and Tianjin. Meanwhile, the Shanghai zone includes Jiangsu and Zhejiang, and is equivalent to 67 Rhode Islands.

Well, no one's tracking the movement of private cars, so in theory it's still possible for you to have driven a private vehicle to those rural areas. Especially if you are like me and you have a Chinese driver's license. Although in order to get the license in the first place, you need a visa good for >= 90 days, so...but in any case, it's still possible for someone else to have driven you to said areas, even if you don't have a license yourself. Or you could have taken a taxi and paid with cash.

Again with the --this is not to be construed as advice-- caveat, many car rental companies don't care if renters have Chinese licenses.

Only a fool would think of driving in China without a proper license.

Deepsix this dumb idea. It's irresponsible to even raise it.

I've seen people do far dumber things, and my friends who actually own fleets of cars don't have any issues (at all) with renting to foreigners that are competent drivers. It's fine to have strong opinions on matters, but this forum has managed to plow along nicely without moral police.

This is exactly what I'm talking about when I mentioned wifi problems earlier. The cause is well known, but Google cannot fix this. Well, Google can circumvent this, but it's not in Google's interest, so they will not. (If you don't understand the last statement, think harder...)

Nothing immoral about driving without a license in China.

It's just plain dumb.

But there is a silver lining. If you’re in an accident and can't produce a license, you won't have to worry whether your ”lodging" will properly register you with the PSB.

Sure they can, and it's not that hard.

You provide a switch for users to control:

1. Whether the system uses a captive portal to determine network connectivity
2. If (1) is set to TRUE, allow user to adjust which captive portal is used

The default settings should be what they are currently. I'd simply disable captive portals entirely, which BTW is how Android worked pre-Gingerbread. They added this stupid "feature" because people were allegedly too dumb to figure out that they needed to turn the wifi OFF if they were connected to a wifi network with a captive portal that wouldn't give them internet access, in order to get any internet access at all. If you want me to get more specific, I believe Verizon wanted it (I worked for the Wi-Fi team at a major Wi-Fi chip maker at the time so we were dealing with issues like this, and our driver had to interact with the Android framework in the proper manner). But rather than educate people, they put a hack on top of it that breaks things in other scenarios.

In my case, all the car rental companies that I have dealt with did not care that I HAD a Chinese driver's license. They would not rent me a car without a Chinese credit card. (thankfully my wife has one).

The issue appears to be specific to Pixel phones...so if you don't have on, you won't need to worry about it.

Furthermore, the wi-fi fix you describe seems rather long-winded. There is a one-time fix that can be applied, but I can't recall the precise steps: I seem to recall it had something to do with adding a second user account then deleting it...I'm sure googling it can come up with the answer..

tb

Given how little time I had to invest in getting my Chinese driver's license (getting a >= 90 day visa, studying for the test for about 8-12 hours, getting the registration form from the police station, going to get a photo taken, health check, going to the DMV to sign up for the test, and taking the test itself, which was all done in around 5 days), and that the license is good for 6 years, I don't think it's worth the risk of driving without a license. And it wasn't like all 5 days were occupied by activities relating to getting the license. I counted 2 days for the visa because I had to go to the consulate twice, once to drop off my passport, and once to pick it up, but that only took around 4 hours to drop off and 3 hours to pick up, and that includes the round-trip drive.