WiFi Scanner on iPhone: See Every Device Connected to Your WiFi

Which devices are connected to your Wi-Fi right now? Your iPhone doesn't show you. The Wi-Fi settings list networks, not the phones, TVs and plugs sitting on yours. In this video we use a network scanner app on the iPhone to see every device, what it is, and which address it has.

This is DeviceShelf for iPhone, running on its demo network. It's a made-up home called Homebase with a dozen devices, so none of these addresses belong to a real person. On your own Wi-Fi, the list fills with your own devices.

When you open the app, it scans the network your phone is on. At the top you see the network's name, its address range, here one ninety two dot one sixty eight dot one dot zero slash twenty four, and how many addresses the scan went through: all two hundred and fifty four.

Below that, four numbers sum up the result: how many devices answered, how many kinds of devices there are, how many open ports the scan found, and the average response time across all devices.

Then comes the list itself. Every row is one device: the name, the vendor, the IP address on the right, and under it the response time. The small numbers are open ports, the doors a device keeps open for other devices. A printer has port six thirty one for printing, a camera has five fifty four for its video stream.

The icon on the left shows the device type. DeviceShelf works it out from what the device tells the network about itself: its name, the services it announces, and the ports it answers on.

Looking for something specific? Type into the search field. It looks at names, addresses, vendors and types at once. Here are all the Apple devices in the house: the MacBook, the iPhone and the Apple TV.

You can also search for part of an address. That's handy when an app or a router page names an IP and you want to know which device it belongs to. Here, one ninety two dot one sixty eight dot one dot thirty is the HP printer.

Clear the field and the whole list comes back.

Tap a device to open its details. This is the Synology DiskStation, a network drive. The top of the sheet asks whether the device is yours. We'll come back to that question in a moment.

Below that you can give the device your own name, set the vendor if it's missing, add tags and a note. Names you set here are kept, so the next scan still says Synology in the living room, and not just an address.

Further down is everything the scan found: the IP address, the hardware address, called the MAC, the hostname, the operating system where the device reveals it, the response time, the services it announces and the open ports. For the DiskStation those are web pages on eighty and four forty three, file sharing on four forty five, and the Synology admin pages on five thousand and five thousand and one.

Swipe the sheet down, or tap outside it, to get back to the list.

One thing is worth knowing before you scan at home. Apple doesn't let any iPhone app read the hardware addresses of other devices. So on its own, the phone finds the devices, their IP addresses, their names and their open ports, but not the MAC address and not the vendor that comes with it.

There are two ways around that. The first is your router. Under Settings, Router, you connect the app to the router's own list of devices. The router knows every hardware address, so the vendors come back, and so do devices that were asleep or hidden during the scan.

The second is a DeviceShelf desktop app or server on the same network. It can read hardware addresses, and the phone shows what it found. That's where the vendors in this demo come from: the note at the bottom of each device says synced from desktop.

Back in the list, one device carries a blue new badge. DeviceShelf remembers every device it has seen. Anything that wasn't there before is marked as new until you say whether you know it.

This one has no name, only a vendor: Espressif. That company makes the Wi-Fi chips inside smart plugs, bulbs and sensors. So it's very likely a smart-home gadget. If you just set one up, tap Yes, it's mine. If you don't recognize it, Ignore takes it off the new list, and Open router takes you to the router, which is where you can block a device.

We just plugged in a new smart plug, so this one is ours. The badge disappears, and from now on a new badge means exactly one thing: a device joined that you haven't seen yet.

To sum up: open the app and it scans your Wi-Fi. The list shows every device with its address, type and open ports. Tap one for the details and give it a name. Connect your router, or a DeviceShelf desktop or server, to get hardware addresses and vendors. And answer the new badge whenever a device you don't know shows up. You'll find DeviceShelf for iPhone in the App Store, and the link is in the description.