Can tablets differentiate between regular wi-fi and mobile hot spot? There are a lot of apps in Android which act differently depending on the internet connection.  Such as apps which auto-upload photos to the could only when connected to Wi-Fi, and not when connected to broadband on a smart-phone.

Unfortunately, when such apps connect to a mobile hot-spot (limited data; tethering), they think it is regular (unlimited data) Wi-Fi, and work accordingly.

Is there any way for a tablet to notice when a Wi-Fi connection is from a mobile hot spot, and act as if it was connected to broadband?
If your tablet (or phone) devices are Android version 4.1 (or newer) then you can tell them that a particular wifi connection is a hotspot rather than broadband, which will let apps know that they should limit the traffic they use.

On the Android 4.1+ devices, if you go into Settings -> Data Usage and then press Menu (or press the "..." overflow button) you should see an option called "Mobile Hotspots".



In here should be a list of all the wifi networks that the device has connected to recently, with a tickbox alongside that you can select to say that the network is actually a mobile hotspot. This tells your phone to treat that wifi network as if it is a mobile data (eg 3G) network instead of a broadband connection.