Hotel Wi-Fi connected. Login page won't load. Fixed in 60 seconds.

It's the login or terms-acceptance page that appears when you join hotel, airport, or café Wi-Fi. The network blocks internet access until you complete it. Hotspot Guide diagnoses why that page fails to appear or load correctly.

A mobile hotspot is your phone sharing its cellular data — iPhone's Personal Hotspot, for example. You connect to your phone's Wi-Fi and use its data plan. No login page, no captive portal, no drama. A public Wi-Fi hotspot is a network at a hotel, airport, or café that requires you to pass through a login or terms page (the captive portal) before getting internet access. Hotspot Guide is for public Wi-Fi hotspots — the ones with the login pages that break. If you're on your own phone's hotspot, everything should just work, and this app isn't what you need.

Immediately, if you're under time pressure and your phone has signal. Hotspot Guide tells you within five seconds if the network infrastructure itself is broken — in which case tethering is the right answer and nothing on your Mac will fix it. But if the problem is iCloud Private Relay or a VPN (which it usually is), the fix takes two taps and you're on the full hotel connection instead of burning cellular data.

You're not online. That's the problem. All of Hotspot Guide's diagnostics and troubleshooting guides work with zero internet connection — because that's when you need them most.

No. $9.99 once, all features unlocked, yours forever. No recurring charges, no premium tier, no features held back.

macOS 15 Sequoia or later. Runs natively on Apple Silicon and Intel Macs.

Apple requires Location authorization for any third-party app that reads the Wi-Fi network name (SSID). Without it, Hotspot Guide can't tell which network you're on — the venue database, connection history, and credential autofill all break. Your geographic location is never accessed, stored, or transmitted anywhere.

No — and that's intentional. macOS doesn't give apps permission to change your network settings on your behalf. What Hotspot Guide does: it tells you exactly what's wrong and opens the right System Settings pane so you can make the change yourself. It's usually two taps: follow the link, toggle the setting.

Slow Wi-Fi has low throughput — downloads take forever, video buffers. But once a packet gets through, it gets through reliably. Flaky Wi-Fi has packet loss or high jitter — packets are dropped unpredictably, which destroys video calls and VoIP even when the speed test looks fine. Hotspot Guide measures both and distinguishes between them.

It's planned. iOS is significantly more restrictive — VPN detection, MDM profile scanning, and Wi-Fi SSID access all require different (or unavailable) APIs. The macOS version is the full-power tool. The iOS version will come when it can do enough to be worth shipping.