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. 🙂
[…] Notas del chat:00:12:50 Adrian Granados: https://www.intuitibits.com/2023/09/21/yet-another-wi-fi-details-shortcut-for-ios/ […]
Very helpful, thanks Adrian.
Getting into the weeds…..how exactly are the Tx/Rx rates determined/calculated? I presume the device is talking directly to the wireless AP/router – I’ve tried breaking down the shortcut code to see how it is working its magic, but I can’t find what I’m looking for.
Thanks!
Devices calculate data rates using multiple parameters, including MCS, channel width, guard interval, etc. See https://mcsindex.com. Note that these rates are the maximum theoretical rates the device can achieve transmitting or receiving based on the current link conditions. As for the shortcut, iOS is reporting the current values. The shortcut doesn’t do any calculations.
But it *is* basing the numbers on actual (for lack of a better term) “live” conditions and not simply a canned number based on theoretical PHY…….is that accurate?
Correct. The MCS index changes if the SNR changes, so a different data rate is used. Hence, the reference to https://mcsindex.com. I said “maximum theoretical” because even if it says that the data rate is 154 Mbps, for example, the throughput will always be much lower.
Perfect! For context – I’m simply taking a suggestion from the related LinkedIn thread and presenting something of a “comparison” between “Wi-Fi” and “internet” speed/performance to help visualize exactly *where* a problem does (or does not) exist to management/leadership/peers. :)
Just another tool.
May only be me, but on my iPhone, it shows the iPhone’s device Wi-Fi MAC address. Even if I use “private MAC” per each SSID. Just sharing what I see, and I also understand if this is due to a restriction in iOS 17.2.1. ….. also, this is a great shortcut & thanks for making it.
By the way, if you have IPv6 disabled in your firewall (meaning it’s only using IPv4 to get an IP from your ISP), the script will timeout and will never finish. Guess how I know, haha. Consider implementing a fix.
Thank you for your comment. Unfortunately, the only possible fix is to remove IPv6 reporting from the shortcut since there isn’t much control over the function that retrieves the IPv6 address(es).
Can you display the channel width?
Unfortunately, no. That type of information is not available using shortcut actions.
Bummer. On iOS 17.3.1., the WiFi shortcut is having some serious issues. Most of the time it just times out and never displays the results. Others, it will run in a few seconds but no output at all. And maybe 1 out of 10 times it shows the proper results. Back on earlier versions of iOS 17 is was rock solid with very fast results every time. Not sure what changed.
Thank you for this great shortcut. By just looking at actions, I learned a lot, but I have still a problem and was wondering, if I could get some advice.
I have created a shortcut, that is supposed to loop until I arrive at my house and then quickly join „my“ WIFI network. In the loop I perform following steps: (1) turn on WIFI (2) check the network name. If the name is correct (my network), I am done, otherwise I turn WI-FI off, wait a few seconds and start the loop again.
Sometimes his works, but I have very often the situation, where I am standing in front of my house and my iPhone just does not connect to my WI-FI, it loops and loops, until I quit the shortcut, open the settings, goto to WI-FI and boom I am connected.
Do you have any advice, how this could be done better and more reliable?
Thanks in advance. Dido
On iOS 17.4 the shortcut almost never works and returns “network is unreachable”. Seems to get this error on the “get current IP address” step.
now. iOS 17.5 beta
Result showing page error