qt 5.9 calling wlanapi

[pihi42]

I'm using qt 5.9 with Visual Studio 2015 for a desktop app.
With recent windows 11 update 24h2, the os is showing that my application is using location services.
Since my app is not using location services at all, I was surprised by this.

Turns out that qt is periodically calling (every 10 seconds or so) wlanapi, function WlanScan, and this causes the windows reporting as "using location". WlanScan is called only if wifi network is connected.
I found this out by using Rohitab's Api Monitor.

I cannot determine how or why these calls are being made. I am using networking via QTcpSocket (listening to connections) and QNetworkRequest (for downloads). I would like to disable calls to WlanScan function of wlanapi.
Any help would be appreciated.

[jsulm]

@pihi42 Did you try with a more recent Qt version?

[pihi42]

@jsulm Not yet. For now, just trying to understand the issue.

[jsulm]

@pihi42 Then I guess you will have to look into Qt source code to find out where WlanScan is called.

[pihi42]

I traced the problem to the qnativewifibearer.dll which was deployed automatically by winqtdeploy. Simply deleting that plugin module stopped wlanscan. The remaining question is - why did the module scan the wifi network every 10 seconds without any requests on its own? Why did winqtdeploy deploy the module that is not needed?
Anyway, that solved my root problem.