One of the best features from Google's Project Fi is coming to Nexus devices

While Google's Project Fi is unlikely to ever reach the UK, Nexus owners in the country will at least be getting one of its best features. The company has announced that Wi-Fi Assistant, which allows your phone to automatically connect to Wi-Fi hotspots, will become more broadly available in the coming weeks.

Wi-Fi Assistant will hand your phone's data connection over to a Google-verified Wi-Fi network if it identifies it as being faster and/or more stable. The theory here is that you can maintain a more consistent connection while at the same time saving data.

Because connecting to public Wi-Fi networks can be dangerous, Wi-Fi Assistant encrypts your phone's connection with a VPN, thereby hiding your location and activity from any undesirables that might be trying to spy on your activity.

The feature will be supported in the US, UK, Canada, Mexico and Nordic countries, on Google Nexus devices running Android 5.1 Lollipop and higher. This means it will be available on everything from 2012's Nexus 4 and Nexus 7 all the way up to this year's Nexus 5X and 6P.

Similarly, we can safely bet that Wi-Fi Assistant will come baked into Google's upcoming Marlin and Sailfish smartphones too.

Once it lands, the feature will be pretty straightforward to set up: just dip into Google's settings app, go to Google>Networking and then toggle the Wi-Fi Assistant switch to 'On'. Once the feature is enabled, your phone's notifications bar will display VPN key icon and the connection status will read 'Connected via Wi-Fi Assistant'.