I live in a duplex apartment where the floor slab between the two floors is very thick, such that, if I am upstairs, for instance, my laptop and phone can "see" the downstairs access point, but the upstairs access point gives much better access. Nonetheless, if my device is connected to the downstairs AP, going upstairs doesn't disconnect it and reconnect to the stronger AP, instead it just gives much poorer access via the downstairs AP. The same is true in reverse, of course. The router lives downstairs and the APs are hardwired to the router (in other words, they are APs not repeaters).
My only solution is to manually disconnect and reconnect when I move between floors. Is there a better solution? Would a mesh network work any differently? The intelligence (it seems to me) needs to reside on the client side, not the AP/network/router side.
(Edit: there was a prompt, automated I think, asking if this was a duplicate of another question, one about increasing wifi range. My question is not about increasing the range of existing wifi access points, but about raising the level of intelligence around which AP is chosen by a device and whether, and how, a device can switch from an AP with a weak signal to one with a strong signal.)