Network devices
The Network devices screen turns the app into a local‑network investigator: it lists the devices on your Wi‑Fi, lets you ping any one of them, and scans its ports to see what it exposes. It’s the natural next step when something on the network “feels off”.
Open it from the dashboard’s overflow menu (⋮ → Network devices). You need to be connected to Wi‑Fi. On mobile data there’s no local network to explore.
Discovering devices
When the screen opens it sweeps your Wi‑Fi network and combines several standard discovery methods so it finds and names as many devices as possible, from computers and printers to TVs, routers and smart‑home kit.
Each device shows its IP, a name where one can be found, reachability latency, and tags for This device and Gateway. The header reads e.g. “9 devices · 254 addresses scanned” so the count is clearly the number of real devices, not the size of the network.
Names
Names come from whatever a device advertises about itself. Where a device only exposes a
model code (for example a smart‑home hub reporting BSB002), the app substitutes a friendly
product label where it can, so you see “Hue Bridge” rather than the part number.
What we don’t show: MAC address and vendor. Some tools list a hardware MAC and vendor (“Apple”, “TP‑Link”). Modern Android doesn’t reliably expose a remote device’s MAC to an app, so we show what we can obtain robustly (IP, name, reachability and latency) rather than promise vendor labels we can’t always deliver.
High vs low confidence
Some networks (particularly phone hotspots and certain routers) answer on behalf of every address in the subnet, which can make a network look like it has hundreds of devices. The app shows high‑confidence devices by default: anything that is named, has an open port, answered a ping, or is your phone or the gateway. Addresses that only sent a bare TCP reset appear behind a “Show N more (low confidence)” row.
Pinging a device
Tap a device, then Start ping. You get continuous latency with last / average / minimum / maximum and packet‑loss figures. It uses TCP‑connect timing, so it still works against devices that block ICMP echo.
Scanning ports
On the device detail screen, choose Quick scan (a curated list of common ports) or Full scan (every port). Open ports are listed with best‑effort service names.
A one‑time notice asks you to only scan networks you own or are permitted to test. Port scanning can trigger intrusion‑detection alerts on networks you don’t control. Closed ports that actively refuse are scanned quickly; hosts that silently drop traffic (firewalled) make a Full scan slower, since each such port has to wait for a timeout.
What gets logged
The network tools are interactive and on‑demand: discovery, ping and port‑scan results are not written to the session log, so they don’t affect your recordings. (By contrast, the connected‑Wi‑Fi measurements of channel width, utilisation, MIMO estimate and Wi‑Fi standard do flow into the log; see the Wi‑Fi metrics reference.)
Caveats
- Wi‑Fi only: there’s no local network to sweep on mobile data.
- Naming: some access points block the traffic devices use to announce their names, which can limit naming on those networks.
- Busy‑looking networks: if a network answers for every address (some hotspots and routers do), lean on the low‑confidence toggle to separate real devices from the noise.