WhyFi

James Potter, Srinivasan Tatachari, Tony Dehnke, Sacha Fournier, and Edmond Bitay looked at the Wi-Fi icon on your Mac—you know, that useless bar graph that's been lying to you for years—and said "we can do better." They built WhyFi, a macOS menu bar app that tells you exactly why your Wi-Fi sucks instead of just showing you pretty bars that don't mean anything. It measures signal strength, noise floor, SNR, transmit rate, router ping, internet ping, jitter, and DNS lookup time. Green means good, orange means degraded, red means something's broken. The menu bar icon literally shows a face that matches your connection—because if your Wi-Fi is unhappy, you should be too.

The real magic is WhyFi Radar. It updates four times per second, so you can walk around your house with your laptop and it tells you exactly where the signal is strongest. It gives you a 0-100 score and literally yells "keep going" or "go back" at you so you don't have to guess. No more "maybe this corner is better." You know. It also shows nearby networks and their signal strengths so you can see what's crowding your airspace. And the speed test includes bufferbloat detection—because nothing ruins a video call like a connection that falls apart the second you try to share your screen. When something's slow, WhyFi tells you whether to blame your Wi-Fi signal, your router, or your ISP. You can even export a diagnostic report and paste it into ChatGPT or Claude for help.

But here's what makes WhyFi different: fifty percent of all sales go to Jet Set Petz, a charity in Bali that vaccinates and sterilizes street dogs and cats. They've helped over 5,000 animals so far. There's no RSPCA equivalent in Bali—unwanted puppies and kittens get dumped in rubbish tips, rice fields, or just left on the street. The ones that survive face disease, starvation, and traffic. Jet Set Petz provides free sterilization and vaccination for strays and pets of low-income families. So when you pay $10 for WhyFi, half of that goes directly to saving animals. You get a tool that actually makes your Wi-Fi usable and you help strays in Bali at the same time. That's not charity, that's a two-for-one deal.

It's $10, macOS 13+ and Apple Silicon only. Download it, fix your Wi-Fi, and feel good about it.