When Panasonic's Android app won't connect to your camera

Plenty of people seem to have been struggling to get Panasonic's Image App to work on recent Android phones. It seems that those of us running Android 7 (codenamed Nougat) have the most problems.

I've found a workaround that works for my Google Pixel with my GX7 and GX80 (or GX85) cameras. Hopefully it'll work you too…

The problem

Before we get into how to solve it, let's check whether you're seeing the symptoms that I am.

Connecting the camera and phone is a two step process.

First, you get them on the same wi-fi network. The simplest approach is to tell the camera to setup its own little wi-fi network, and then get the phone to connect to it.

This first part has always worked fine for me.

The second step is automatic; the app and the camera should automatically start communicating with each other once the wi-fi connection has been established.

It's this second step that has stopped working properly. All I see on the phone's screen is a couple of spinning discs, a "Please wait" message, and an invitation to close a dialog and establish a connection manually (which is unhelpful, as the network connection has been established by this point).

The workaround

Luckily, it's simple:

• Put your phone into "aeroplane mode", to stop your phone from connecting to the internet via your mobile network.
• Re-enable wi-fi networking.
• Try and setup the connection, as normal.

You should find that step 1 (establishing a local wi-fi network connection) will work as before, and step 2 (the app finding the camera) should happen soon afterwards.

I'm running Android 7.1.2 and version 1.10.2 of the Panasonic app.

Good luck, and let me know if it worked!