eskimo,
Thanks for taking the lead on this issue.
My app communicates with the Nissan Leaf electric vehicle by using a WiFi OBDII adapter plugged into the Leaf's OBDII port. This makes a local "hotspot" that my app can communicate with after the user has selected the OBDII WiFi network.
The first thing a user of my app does after install is to register the WiFi OBDII adatper's SSID with the app. The user starts my app and confirms on a settings screen that the current WiFi SSID is the WiFi OBDII adapter's SSID. Now my app knows (but not in iOS 9!) by reading the current WiFi SSID if the iOS device is connected to the Leaf. If it is my app will start collecting data to display to the user. If the SSID is not the registered one then my app goes into an offline mode and just lets the user review previously saved data. If will also disable running in the background if the SSID does not match. While in offline mode the app polls the current SSID to see if it ever matches the registered one. If it does match, a connection is established and data is collected.
The temporary fix I am looking at, which I don't think is very good, is to just assume that the current WiFi SSID is always the OBDII adapter's SSID. This is ok if the WiFi network is actually the OBDII adapter network. But in the case that it is not ,the app will try to communicate with whatever network is selected or even when none is selected. It will do this over and over again wasting power in a futile attempt to communicate with the Leaf.
My app can also run in the background and the app uses the current SSID to know when the user has moved out of range of the WiFi OBDII adapter in which case it will stop running in the background. This will not happen with this fix and if the user does not go into the app settings and disable background operation the battery will be drained unnecessarily making for an unhappy customer when their battery goes dead.
To me readng the current WiFi SSID is no different then reading the screen size or iOS version number. It tells the app critical information about the environment.
It appears your developers think the WiFi network is only used to connect to the internet so no one should care about the SSID. That is not the case.