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MAC addresses aren't available in the LAN scanner on iOS 11 to iOS 26

Update for iOS 27: Starting with iOS 27, Apple introduced a special permission for network utility apps that gives them access to the ARP table again. Network Analyzer 9.2 and later uses it, so on iOS 27 the LAN scanner shows the MAC addresses and manufacturers of the scanned devices again, and custom names can be assigned to them. If you can update to iOS 27, the rest of this article no longer applies to you.

On iOS 11 to iOS 26, the LAN scanner doesn't show MAC addresses. This happens because, since iOS 11, Apple doesn't allow apps to access the MAC addresses in the ARP table of the operating system and read the addresses from there during the scan. I talked with Apple engineers about this problem at WWDC and was told that this is a privacy feature of iOS because MAC addresses are unique and some developers misuse them to track users.

The consequences of not having access to the MAC addresses in the ARP table are:

  1. MAC addresses of the scanned devices cannot be shown.
  2. Manufacturers of the scanned devices cannot be shown as these are derived from the first 3 bytes of the MAC address using the OUI database.
  3. Custom names cannot be assigned to the discovered devices — there is no unique identifier for the discovered devices apart from their MAC (IP addresses can change because of DHCP), so the app doesn't know which device the name should be assigned to.
  4. For WOL, the MAC address has to be determined by some other means — e.g., checking the label on the back of the device or going through the device's configuration menus — and then entered manually into the app.
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