iOS: Detect Personal Hotspot

When you want to detect the type of available connections on an iPhone, the best resource you can find on the web is the sample code from Erica Sadun’s excellent iPhone Cookbook book (which I can wholeheartedly recommend). The sample code can be found on github (look into 02 and 03): https://github.com/erica/iphone-3.0-cookbook-/tree/master/C13-Networking

While the solution presented is great, it fails to work on an iPhone 4 that has the Personal Hotspot feature enabled. In this scenario, the iPhone will create a network interface called “ap0″ that bridges through to “en0″ (WiFi) and “pdp_ip0″ (3G) . Since “en0″ will not be marked as AF_INET interface in this scenario, the approach Erica outlined will fail here. Here’s a dump of the available interfaces, their loopback and AF_INET status and their assigned address:

2011-07-22 12:59:07.120 RowMotion[286:707] name: lo0, inet: 0, loopback: 0, adress: 24.3.0.0
2011-07-22 12:59:07.126 RowMotion[286:707] name: lo0, inet: 0, loopback: 0, adress: 0.0.0.0
2011-07-22 12:59:07.129 RowMotion[286:707] name: lo0, inet: 1, loopback: 0, adress: 127.0.0.1
2011-07-22 12:59:07.134 RowMotion[286:707] name: lo0, inet: 0, loopback: 0, adress: 0.0.0.0
2011-07-22 12:59:07.137 RowMotion[286:707] name: en0, inet: 0, loopback: 1, adress: 6.3.6.0
2011-07-22 12:59:07.141 RowMotion[286:707] name: ap0, inet: 0, loopback: 1, adress: 6.3.6.0
2011-07-22 12:59:07.145 RowMotion[286:707] name: pdp_ip0, inet: 0, loopback: 1, adress: 255.7.0.0
2011-07-22 12:59:07.149 RowMotion[286:707] name: pdp_ip0, inet: 1, loopback: 1, adress: 10.217.22.129
2011-07-22 12:59:07.154 RowMotion[286:707] name: pdp_ip1, inet: 0, loopback: 1, adress: 255.7.0.0
2011-07-22 12:59:07.157 RowMotion[286:707] name: pdp_ip2, inet: 0, loopback: 1, adress: 255.7.0.0
2011-07-22 12:59:07.161 RowMotion[286:707] name: pdp_ip3, inet: 0, loopback: 1, adress: 255.7.0.0
2011-07-22 12:59:07.165 RowMotion[286:707] name: en1, inet: 0, loopback: 1, adress: 6.3.6.0
2011-07-22 12:59:07.168 RowMotion[286:707] name: bridge0, inet: 0, loopback: 1, adress: 6.7.6.0
2011-07-22 12:59:07.172 RowMotion[286:707] name: bridge0, inet: 1, loopback: 1, adress: 172.20.10.1

See that last line? Yep, that’s the bridge interface we need to use to communicate with other devices on our “personal hotspot”. Here’s how to ammend Erica’s code to make personal hotspots transparent:

// Matt Brown's get WiFi IP addy solution
// http://mattbsoftware.blogspot.com/2009/04/how-to-get-ip-address-of-iphone-os-v221.html
+ (NSString *) localWiFiIPAddress
{
    BOOL success;
    struct ifaddrs * addrs;
    const struct ifaddrs * cursor;
    
    success = getifaddrs(&addrs) == 0;
    if (success) {
        cursor = addrs;
        while (cursor != NULL) {
            
            NSString *name = [NSString stringWithUTF8String:cursor->ifa_name];
            
            NSLog(@"available network interfaces: name: %@, inet: %d, loopback: %d, adress: %@", name, cursor->ifa_addr->sa_family == AF_INET, (cursor->ifa_flags & IFF_LOOPBACK) == 0, [NSString stringWithUTF8String:inet_ntoa(((struct sockaddr_in *)cursor->ifa_addr)->sin_addr)]);
            
            // the second test keeps from picking up the loopback address
            if (cursor->ifa_addr->sa_family == AF_INET && (cursor->ifa_flags & IFF_LOOPBACK) == 0) 
            {
                if ([name isEqualToString:@"en0"] || [name isEqualToString:@"bridge0"])  //  Wi-Fi adapter, or iPhone 4 Personal hotspot bridge adapter
                    return [NSString stringWithUTF8String:inet_ntoa(((struct sockaddr_in *)cursor->ifa_addr)->sin_addr)];
            }
            cursor = cursor->ifa_next;
        }
        freeifaddrs(addrs);
    }
    return nil;
}

+ (BOOL) activeWLAN
{
    return ([self localWiFiIPAddress] != nil);
}

+ (BOOL) activePersonalHotspot
{

    // Personal hotspot is fixed to 172.20.10
    return ([self activeWLAN] && [ hasPrefix:@"172.20.10"]);
}

+ (BOOL) activeWLAN
{
    return ([self localWiFiIPAddress] != nil);
}

+ (BOOL) activePersonalHotspot
{
    // Personal hotspot is fixed to 172.20.10
    NSString* localWifiAddress = [self localWiFiIPAddress];
    return (localWifiAddress != nil && [localWifiAddress hasPrefix:@"172.20.10"]);
}

I hope this will find it’s way into the sample code soon. Pull request is pending.