Please take the time to chime in there and tell me what are your thoughts on this solution currently yes you must set your STATION mode within your program not to have any conflicts which was my understanding...
But what I have introduced I believe is a fool proof solution allowing people to connect and stay connectected in station mode once the button is pressed and continue to connect or try to connect in that mode until a button that is pressed to disconnect in which case it will go to AP mode in accordance with your settings on the settings page I believe this would solve all issues. The problem stems I believe from trying to make it to easy with an automatic handler the problem I see is we need some user intervention to correct the problem a connect and disconnect button should provide the remedy to fix this problem.
To sum it up here is how it works
Under station mode information on the settings page you will have 2 buttons.
(Connect Button) when pushed your device is put in and remains in station mode until disconnect is pushed even after a reset or power loss or whatever.
(Disconnect Button) When this button is pushed your device retains all settings on the web page for your Station Mode and AP mode but it disconnects completely from station mode and enters AP mode with your supplied information.
I would still like to see the ability to change the IP of the device in AP mode to something other than 192.168.4.1 but it is not needed as we can have different SSID's etc but the problem with having the same IP's if you control a server that using several wireless cards to connect to each ESP and you send a command to the IP 192.168.4.1 for instance and it does the same operation like turn on a relay to turn on the light and on the other it may turn on a relay to open your garage door you may just accidentally leave your garage door open.
Anyhow maybe just leave your feedback here but I think this method would fix any persistence problems and/or problems with changing the AP name as I pointed out the AP name does no longer change from ESP to what you enter anymore either but these buttons should in fact fix everything and make it a lot more user friendly with a level of user intervention.
If this makes since...
Here is hoping I can get through on this one.
Where I buy my ESP8266 boards from... (Banggood)