Most people have no idea what is on their home network. Printers, TVs, smart plugs, a forgotten media box, a router admin page nobody has opened since setup. They all share the same Wi-Fi as your laptop and your phone. We built mDNSShark to answer one question from your pocket: what is actually on this network, and is any of it a problem?
mDNSShark is a free, open-source network scanner and packet monitor for iPhone (iOS 18.2 or later). It finds the devices on your Wi-Fi, flags the risky ones, and shows you the traffic. The code is MIT licensed and lives in the GitHub repo, and the app is on the App Store.
Discovery that starts where devices announce themselves
Most devices on a home network advertise themselves. mDNSShark listens for Bonjour/mDNS (DNS-SD) and SSDP announcements to find AirPlay receivers, printers, file shares, smart TVs, and gateways. For quieter services that never announce, an optional /24 scan goes looking, and OUI lookups identify the manufacturer behind each device. You end up with a map of your network built from what the devices say about themselves, not a guess. For a step-by-step walkthrough, see the guide to listing Bonjour and mDNS services on your network.
From a device list to a security assessment
A list of devices is only half the answer. mDNSShark flags risky exposed services and checks each manufacturer against CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog and the NVD, so a device that looks harmless is held up against vulnerabilities that are known to be exploited. Findings export as a plain-text report, which makes it easy to hand to whoever manages the network, or to keep as a record of what you found and when.
Seeing the traffic, locally
The Packets view shows DNS and SNI activity as it happens, using a local packet tunnel with no remote server. That is usually enough to see which devices are talking to which hosts, and captures export to pcap if you want to take a closer look in Wireshark. For deeper analysis, an optional TLS Inspection feature runs a local HTTPS proxy that decrypts and logs HTTPS traffic. It requires your consent and runs on the device, the same as everything else.
Open source, with a free core
The app is free to download, and the discovery, assessment, and packet views are part of that. TLS Inspection is the one optional subscription, at $1.99/month with a 3-day free trial. Because the whole app is open source, you do not have to take our word for any of the privacy claims above. You can read the code that does the scanning and see where the data goes. Feature requests, bug reports, and pull requests all go through GitHub.
We build software with the same premise across everything we ship: the work should run where your data already is, and a tool should not need to phone home to be useful. mDNSShark is that idea applied to the one network most of us never look at. If you have ever wondered what is hiding on your Wi-Fi, it takes a minute to find out.