🦊 Netfox 0.22.1 — the row that vanished when macOS 27 landed

Hey everyone 👋

Small release, but it's the kind I find interesting: nobody broke this one. It broke by itself, the day macOS 27 shipped.

Netfox tells you which operating system a device runs by reading a number the device advertises about itself. That number was supposed to track one thing, and it turns out it tracks another — the two just happened to agree for every release up to macOS 26. This year they stopped agreeing. So the table that turns that number into a name came up one row short, and every Mac that updated to macOS 27 quietly lost its OS row.

Here's why nobody reported it: the row didn't go wrong, it went absent. And an absent row looks exactly like a device that chose not to answer. There was nothing to see 🙈

That's fixed in 0.22.1. The more useful half is the test. Every check in that suite compared against numbers typed into the suite itself, so the whole thing stayed green on a machine the table had never heard of — which is precisely the broken state. One of them even asserted that the next macOS was unknown, so it would have passed by agreeing with the bug.

There's now a check that asks the Mac it's running on whether Netfox can name its system. Green today, red the first day someone runs it on a macOS nobody has added a row for. Next divergence is a failing test instead of a blank line.

Nothing else in the app behaves differently in this one.

Update from Netfox → Check for Updates…, or grab it at https://netfox.app 🦊

Curious what you'd want to see next — happy to have the roadmap argued with.