📡 Netfox 0.17.0 — is my Wi-Fi the problem? Now it just tells you

Hey everyone 👋

Every Wi-Fi tool shows you numbers. Signal, noise, a channel number, maybe a chart. Then it leaves you there — because the numbers were never the question. The question is is my Wi-Fi the problem?

Netfox 0.17.0 answers it in a sentence.

The Wi-Fi tab: a plain-English verdict, the three numbers behind it, and every channel in the band

🔍 Four answers, and two of them want opposite things

The Wi-Fi looks fine · the channel is busy · the signal is weak · both at once.

That last distinction is the whole point. A crowded channel is fixed by changing channel. A weak signal is fixed by moving closer to the router. Do the first when you have the second and you burn an evening on settings for nothing — and the raw numbers never told you which one you had.

📊 The three numbers behind the sentence

How many networks share your spectrum · how many are close enough in strength to actually compete for the channel · your SNR.

The middle one decides the verdict, and it's deliberately not the first. An access point far below yours overlaps your spectrum on paper and never holds you up. Counting it would call a perfectly good link crowded.

The 15 dB window that defines "competing" was measured, not picked — on a real environment with 33 access points visible at 5 GHz, where the count sat flat all the way out to 15 dB and only then climbed 📈

🧭 It names a quieter channel — when one really exists

And it judges that channel by the width your access point would carry there. An 80 MHz AP on channel 36 is using 36 through 48, so a "quiet" channel inside that stretch isn't quiet at all.

🤐 The part I'm proudest of is what it refuses to say

A confidently wrong verdict is worse than none. So: a band it barely saw gets no suggestion, not a hedged one. A "quieter" channel has to be quieter by a real margin. And where macOS gives no noise reading, the signal half reads unknown rather than being assumed good — no clean bill of health from a measurement that never happened.

👻 A hidden network is now explained, not just labelled

Hiding the name is widely believed to be a security measure. It isn't: the devices that already know the network announce its name while they look for it. You've made it harder for you to join and no harder for anyone else to find. Netfox now says so — and counts those networks toward congestion, since spectrum doesn't care whether a name is published.

⚡ And: free a port on your Mac, no terminal

Local Services — every port your Mac is listening on, including the loopback-only ones

Netfox already showed you that something was holding 3000. Now each row can ask that process to quit — politely first, so a dev server saves what it was holding; force only offered if it ignores that.

Three details that mattered more than they sound: a server running a worker per core gets all of them asked, not just the first · a listener owned by the system says why it can't be quit instead of being a dead button · and the port is re-read right before anything is sent, because PIDs get reused.

🏷️ More devices say what they are — growing the service catalog turned out to be a bug fix: HomeKit accessories were arriving as Unknown because nothing looked for the Accessory Protocol, with the label for them already written and unreachable. Screen sharing, scanning and Matter are named now too.

👉 Free, universal binary, macOS 15.6+, signed and notarized: https://netfox.app

And the honest question back at you: when your Wi-Fi feels slow, what do you actually check first? I'd like to know whether this verdict answers it or misses it 👀