🦊 Netfox 0.14.0 — your Apple TV is an Apple TV
Hey everyone 👋
Just shipped Netfox 0.14.0, and this one started with a bug report I couldn't stop thinking about.
I turned on my Apple TV and it wasn't in the list. Except it was — sitting there as a phone, with no manufacturer, under the name I'd given it years ago. 📺➡️📱
Here's why, and it's a nice little lesson in how device discovery actually works:
An Apple TV announces the same services a Mac and a HomePod announce. Its name was "Living Room", which tells you nothing. So every clue Netfox had was either ambiguous or empty — and it guessed wrong.
But the device was stating its exact model the whole time. Netfox just wasn't listening. 🙉
So 0.14.0 stops guessing and starts asking.
🎯 Devices are identified by what they declare. Most of them state their model outright on the network. That now outranks every other clue, so an Apple TV called "Living Room" or a HomePod called "Kitchen" is filed correctly — and the model shows in the detail panel.
🏭 A manufacturer for nearly everything. Netfox now carries the complete public registry of hardware makers — around 53,000 entries — instead of a short hand-curated list. On my own network that went from 2 devices naming their maker to nearly all of them.
🕵️ A randomized address says so. Phones and laptops increasingly invent a fresh address per network, for privacy. There's genuinely no maker to look up, so the field reads "Private address" rather than sitting blank. A complete answer, not a gap.
🧩 One row per device. Some devices could appear twice — once named, once as a bare address. Netfox now recognises them as the same thing, and repairs the ones already in your list on first launch.
📡 Hidden Wi-Fi networks now have a maker. A hidden network withholds its name, so its row says nothing and several look identical. The access point still identifies its manufacturer — and one from the same brand as your router is almost always its own service or mesh network, not a neighbour's.
📌 The Online/Offline filter stays where you put it. Small thing. Annoyed me for months.
Update via Netfox → Check for Updates…
As always — what would you like to see next? 🦊
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