It looks like some (most?) HTC phones running Android, such as my HTC EVO, are not capable of receiving multicast or broadcast datagram packets over the Wi-Fi network. This means that apps which rely on such communication will fail, often with no indication of the problem. From the app's perspective, no obvious error is happening — it can only assume that no other devices on the network are transmitting such datagrams. Multicast communication is becoming increasingly common as a technique for devices to discover each other on a network, and the absence of this capability represents serious breakage that leaves apps crippled. Examples of resources an app might use multicast to discover are:

• iTunes music libraries
• entertainment center components such as Roku and AppleTV
• network shares
• other devices running the same app, to set up multiplayer games

Without a functioning multicast capability, these apps either don't work, or require the user to manually configure the IP addresses of the other devices.

There is speculation that HTC's restriction is an attempt to save power and prolong battery life — it takes energy to process a network's many multicast and broadcast packets, many of which are useless to the device and its applications. However, Android already has a facility for allowing prudent use of multicast when needed. Applications acquire a WifiManager.MulticastLock for the duration of their multicast needs, which causes the Wi-Fi chip to stop filtering multicast packets until the app releases the lock. Thus, multicast processing in the software TCP/IP stack only happens when it's really needed.

This is a bit frustrating, as I'm currently tinkering with some multicast code. Some people have been able to fix the problem by rooting their phones and replacing the /system/bin/wpa_supplicant binary with a stock version. This doesn't seem to help on my EVO. To add to the frustration, it can be difficult to test multicast in the Android emulator. I finally had some success in testing multicast code by running android-x86 in a VirtualBox virtual machine, with the network configured for bridging.

References:

• HTC Desire Android 2.1-update1 does not receive udp broadcasts (Android issue #8407)
• Multicast on Android 2.2 (Stack Overflow)