Apple recently launched iOS 17 with new options to retrieve details about your Wi-Fi connection using Shortcuts. When adding the “Get Network Details” action to a shortcut, you can choose from network name (SSID), BSSID, Wi-Fi standard, receive and transmit rates, RSSI, noise, and channel number.

As you already know, Apple doesn’t allow access to Wi-Fi information by any third-party apps, so this addition to iOS 17 is a good step towards having some visibility into the Wi-Fi network on your iPhone or iPad (without installing Apple’s Wi-Fi diagnostics profile every 30 days).

Inspired by other members of the Wi-Fi community who have put together some excellent shortcuts to get or even push the details of your Wi-Fi connection to the cloud, I’ve made yet another shortcut, “My Wi-Fi,” that creates a full, nicely formatted report about the Wi-Fi network you’re connected to using the information available from the “Get Network Details” action and some more.

In addition to the fields listed above, the shortcut calculates and displays the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and provides a signal quality rating based on it. Also, as part of the information in the report, the shortcut will try to determine the AP vendor based on the network’s BSSID using the MAC Address Lookup cloud service (Jiri Brejcha created a shortcut to resolve AP vendors, too). Because Apple considers the BSSID sensitive information (bad actors can use it to determine your physical location), when you run it, the shortcut will ask your permission to send the BSSID over an API call to https://api.maclookup.app to resolve the AP vendor.

One thing to be aware of is that the report doesn’t refresh. If you want to reload the information, you must rerun the shortcut. There are options to include a “button” to rerun the shortcut from within (check Jim Vajda’s shortcut), but it limits how you can display the information, and I couldn’t use it as I wanted to output an HTML page, which is what you get for the report. Also, your best option to share the information using this shortcut is by taking a screenshot and sharing it. If you want to copy or share the data, use Jim’s shortcut instead.

You can download the shortcut here. Check it out and add it to your home screen!

By the way, suppose Apple changes the rules and allows developers to get information about your Wi-Fi network on iOS. In that case, this shortcut is an excellent example of how an app like “WiFi Signal” could look on your iPhone or iPad. Maybe someday. 🙂