How to set up a Hunter fan Wifi control by decompiling the app

Update I made an open source web/android app that can do this for you. Note you’ll still need the SimpleConnect app to connect the fan to wifi.

I got a hunter fan recently that was supposed to be controllable via an app called SimpleConnect. Looking at the reviews, it doesn’t work. It gets stuck on the email verification step. You get an email link that opens in the app and does nothing.

I decided to inspect the apk file with dex2jar and JD-GUI. All the confirm account step actually has to do is send a PUT request to a url with a token from the email. No need for an app at all really.

Confirming the account

To confirm the email sign up and get the email link. It should look something like https://app-launcher.aylanetworks.com/launch?custom_url=aylacontrol://user_sign_up_token?token=XXXXXXXX

All we need is the token. The app is supposed to then make a PUT request to https://user.aylanetworks.com/users/confirmation.json with a payload of

{
	"confirmation_token": "XXXXXXXX"
}

You can do this yourself in postman. Just enter the payload in the Body tab as raw JSON.

You should get a response with the same personal data you entered before. It should include approved: true.

Adding the fan

The next issue you’ll face is that the QR code is printed too small with very poor quality. The app also seems to set the camera in some sort of poor quality mode. I tried a couple devices and eventual got the code to scan with a Pixel C tablet.

Pretty amazing Ayla Networks made such a worthless app. No testing at all. But what do you expect with internet of things devices.

Google Assistant Integration

It’s not that hard to set up, but it’s not well documented. You just go here to set it up after setting up the simple connect wifi app. It’s a bit clunky saying “tell simple connect to do something” but it works.