You Can Turn Your Old Android Phone Into a Wi-Fi Extender for Your Home Network.
If you have an old Android device gathering dust at home, there are plenty of ways to repurpose it —for example, turning it into a webcam or a dedicated smart home controller. However, there’s a less obvious option: protecting your home from Wi-Fi dead zones. Anyone with spots in their home where Wi-Fi coverage is poor knows how frustrating it can be: as soon as you move out of range, you suddenly lose access to messages, media files, and news. But an old Android phone can help.
Android smartphones can certainly connect to Wi-Fi networks, but they can also act as access points for those same networks. With the right setup, you can turn an old phone into a Wi-Fi booster (or Wi-Fi repeater)—a device that rebroadcasts the Wi-Fi signal to extend its range. Repeaters can’t increase the received signal speed, but they can extend it, allowing you to connect to the internet in rooms your Wi-Fi previously couldn’t reach. While purchasing a dedicated device for this purpose may yield better results, if you already have a spare Android device at home, try this method before spending any money.
Turn your old Android device into a Wi-Fi signal booster.
Since Android is Android, the exact method depends on your phone’s make and model, but generally, you’ll need to find the Wi-Fi hotspot feature in your device’s settings menu. For example, on a Pixel phone, you’ll find it under “Network & Internet” and “Tethering & Hotspot.” From there, turn on Wi-Fi hotspot , which will create a new Wi-Fi network based on your primary one. Tapping the “Wi-Fi hotspot” menu item allows you to set a name and password for this new network. The only downside is that you’ll need to give the boosted Wi-Fi network in your “dead zone” a different name and password than your regular Wi-Fi network.
There are a few other things to consider here: make sure “Automatically turn off hotspot” is disabled to ensure the hotspot always stays active; under “Speed and Compatibility,” in most cases, you should enable 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz (or both) to minimize the chance of issues with the device connecting. You should also probably keep this device connected to the network to conserve battery life. If your new Wi-Fi extender fails to turn on, it will defeat the purpose of using it.
If it’s an older device, it may not have cellular access anyway, but to confirm it’s a Wi-Fi hotspot, you can remove the SIM card or disable data access. (On Pixel, this option is in Settings > Network & Internet > SIM Cards .) Otherwise, your extender may be working over cellular. On most other Android phones, you’ll find a similar set of settings: on Samsung Galaxy devices, open Settings and tap Connections > Mobile Hotspot & Tethering . A toggle for Mobile Hotspot will then appear, and you can tap Mobile Hotspot to access the network settings.
I turned my Galaxy S25 Ultra into a Wi-Fi repeater.
I tested this on a Galaxy S25 Ultra , and it worked exactly as advertised. Given the power of the components inside the smartphone, it’s never going to compare to, say, a mesh network , but for smaller data transfers where download and upload speeds aren’t a priority, it could be useful—and, of course, it’s free if you already have a backup Android device you no longer use.
I had to experiment a bit to get the phone positioned correctly between the router and the laptop I was trying to connect to the internet, but I think you can figure it out with some trial and error. At least with the Galaxy S25 Ultra, the phone doesn’t necessarily need to be in the same room as the device you’re connecting to, but it helps. My home broadband speed averages around 300 Mbps, so I placed the Galaxy S25 Ultra in a room on the second floor to use as a hotspot. When connecting the laptop to the phone in the same room, the download speed was around 60 Mbps—significantly slower, but still fast enough for streaming high-definition video.
When I moved the laptop further away, I could still use the Galaxy S25 Ultra as a modem, but the speed dropped to around 12 Mbps. This is a significant drop from the maximum possible speed, but the connection was still perfectly usable for checking email, browsing the web, and writing this article in Google Docs. Results may vary depending on the phone you’re using, your internet speed, and the layout of your home, but this will likely work on many Android devices. However, keep in mind that phones of a certain age may not support this feature: according to Reddit users , this trick works on most recent Pixel devices, but not, for example, the Google Pixel 7a.