Measuring Signal Strength from wifi to Iphone/Ipad

Question

I want to get the current Wifi signal strength from an iOS device. A Google search reveals only solutions for Android devices. From the literature I gather that Apple does not allow to access hardware and so nobody can retrieve the device's signal strength in dbm through their app.

Is this correct?

Answer 1

As you say, there is no way to do this as Apple doesn't allow apps access to the necessary hardware. (There seems to have been a way to do it in iOS 5 but only using private APIs.)

What you can do - and what, according to this article, some apps are doing - is measure network throughput instead. While that is in no way identical with Wi-Fi signal strength, it may be a reasonable workaround for your application, depending on what it is supposed to do.

Here are some Stack Overflow questions dealing with measuring network throughput:

• Determine the speed on internet programmatically
• Calculating Connection/Download Speed