Diagnosing a tablet that claimed "no internet" took twenty adb commands
to establish something the app should have said in one run: ping to
1.1.1.1 worked, the configured DNS server answered a raw UDP query in
65 bytes, and Android still could not resolve a hostname. The network was
fine; netd had wedged.
Those two failures look identical to a user and want opposite responses —
"look at your router" against "toggle your wifi" — so dns.resolver asks
the network's own servers directly and compares the answer against what
the platform returns for the same name. The query is hand-rolled over a
plain DatagramSocket on purpose: anything routed through a resolver API
would inherit the very fault being looked for.
dns.system_resolver_broken fires only on the pairing that is otherwise
unattributable: server answered, platform did not. Per network, because a
phone can have wedged wifi and working cellular at once.
Also records Android's own verdict per network — validated, captive
portal, partial connectivity — which the app reproduced with its own HTTP
probes but never stored. It is free, it is what the user sees in the
status bar, and its disagreement with our measurements is exactly what
identified the tablet. NET_CAPABILITY_PARTIAL_CONNECTIVITY is @SystemApi
so the constant is inlined with its rationale, in the manner of OsAbi.kt,
and read defensively enough to report unknown rather than false.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
