I reformatted my Android phone (LG G3 with Android 5.0.1, software version LS990ZVG) the other day to address a problem I was having. After reformatting, I reinstalled all of my apps and everything seemed to be working fine until I tried to log into the Wink Hub app to adjust the settings for some of the lights in my house. When I tried to log in, I got the following error:
looks like we encountered an error on the server; please try again later
I figured that Wink’s servers might be down, so I gave it a little bit of time and tried again. An hour later, I got the same message. Thinking it might be a real outage, I googled to see if Wink was reporting anything and didn’t see anything, though it did happen to coincide with Amazon’s AWS service going down, so I thought it might be related. The light situation wasn’t that urgent, so I didn’t think much of it until the next day when I had the same light issue and wanted to adjust the settings of the Wink Hub on my phone again. I tried to log in and got the same error, again. This time I figured something must be wrong. I tried a few things before I found out the real problem.
First, I tried clicking on “I forgot my password” to have my password reset, but I got the same error. That meant I couldn’t reset my password and there was definitely something wrong.
I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the Wink Hub app, but got the same error after reinstalling the app.
Then I started googling. In one forum buried deep in the recesses of the internet, I found a hint at what might be the problem. And, not surprisingly, it’s the same piece of software that has plagued me for years: Sprint’s stupid Data Optimizer app. I’ve had issues with this app in the past as it slowed and killed my data connection. I routinely turn it off immediately after I reformat my phone because it is so worthless. As it turns out, it was the culprit with this problem as well since I had forgotten to turn it off.
You can find the app in your list of apps under Optimize & Protect (see the screenshot):
When you open the app, you’ll see the following two options:
Click on Data Optimizer and you’ll see this screen:
Turn the Data Optimizer off and you can now log into the Wink Hub app.
I don’t know exactly what the problem is, but I’m guessing it has to do with how the Sprint Data Optimizer manages data. It likely is compressing it and the Wink Hub app may not allow login credentials to be sent that way to the server. Regardless of the problem, as soon as I turned this terrible piece of software off, I was able to log into the Wink Hub app and adjust my lighting settings.
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