NetBlade is coming to iPhone
Published on September 4, 2026
NetBlade grew up on Android, where the system lets you read a good deal of what happens on the network. On iPhone those doors are shut, and an honest port has to start there: not from what you would like to rebuild, but from what the platform actually allows. The app is not downloadable yet and we are not promising a date; this is where it stands and the decisions that got it here.
A rewrite, not a wrapper
There is no web page dressed up as an app: it is Swift code with a SwiftUI interface, written from scratch. Working today: the local network scanner, the port scanner, ping and traceroute, DNS and WHOIS lookups, the TLS certificate inspector, the subnet calculator, Wake-on-LAN and the SNMP client. There is also an SSH terminal and an FTP client with directory browsing, the latter written by hand. The biggest piece is still missing, Windows machine inventory, and it is deliberately last because it is the most tangled: SMB, WinRM and NTLM are not protocols you reimplement in an afternoon.
Why SNMP came first
On Android, to find out which devices are on the network, you read the kernel's ARP table: a ready-made list of IP and MAC addresses the system maintains anyway. On iOS that table is not available. A device's MAC is what reveals its manufacturer, and without the manufacturer a list of IP addresses says very little: knowing that something answers at 192.168.1.22 is not the same as knowing it is a smart plug. What is left is to ask the router, and the router speaks SNMP. That is why it was the first protocol ported rather than a nice-to-have: on iPhone it is the backbone that replaces what Android hands you for free.
The Wi-Fi analyser will not be there
On Android, NetBlade lists nearby networks with their channel, signal and security, and recommends the quietest channel. On iPhone it does not exist, and that is neither our choice nor a matter of time: iOS exposes no public interface for scanning surrounding access points. An app knows only the network it is currently joined to. Nobody has a version that works, because it is not a question of skill: that door is shut for everyone. We would rather say so now than let someone discover it after downloading for exactly that feature.
Meanwhile, on Android
The Android version is complete and available on Google Play, in 42 languages. There is no date for iPhone yet: when there is something to try, we will write about it here.