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‘Settings > Wi-Fi’ in the iPhone’s homescreen itself makes a good Wi-Fi ’sniffer’, i.e. watching for open Wi-Fi networks that you can piggyback onto for checking your email or looking something up on the web or in Google Maps. Yes, yes, this sort of thing isn’t strictly legal, but in this day and age, an open Wi-Fi point is considered fair game all round, provided its presence isn’t abused. WiFinder aims to improve the sniffing experience…

As with the built-in Settings Wi-Fi sniffer, the networks around you are listed, along with pertinent information, in this case the
security used (if any), the signal strength and the Wi-Fi channel being used, a little more detailed than the built-in scanner. Where WiFinder scores (or claims to score) is in its further analysis of what it finds.

For any ‘Open’ networks, it not only lists these at the top of the display, making it easy to see what’s available at a glance, it also takes a few seconds to try connecting to each, putting up a red or green icon, as appropriate. You see, many ‘Open’ networks actually have other restrictions in place, such as MAC (device) filtering, so until you try connecting you don’t really know if a Wi-Fi point will be any use.

The theory’s great, but in practice, I found that WiFinder was too quick to dismiss many open access points, putting up a big red icon. When I switched back to the iPhone home screen and used ‘Settings > Wi-Fi’ instead, I was often able to connect and get online after all. And there were several occasions when it claimed it couldn’t see any networks at all – these would then reappear on the next scan. You can alter the frequency with which scans are done, plus there’s a notification system, though due to the iPhone’s lack of proper multitasking, there’s no way for this to work outside the application itself.

WiFinder is a great idea, well implemented but with some niggles -hopefully nothing a code tweak couldn’t sort out.