What your phone's Wi-Fi analyser is really telling you

The problem we were solving

Most people treat Wi-Fi like air. You walk into a café, see a network name, and connect. Done. What you're actually doing is handing your phone access to a network run by someone you've never met, with encryption standards you can't see and encryption protocols you probably couldn't name if asked.

When we launched Shield (our paid tier), one of the first requests we got was simple: tell users whether their Wi-Fi is actually safe. Not whether it's convenient, not whether it has a password. Actually safe. We knew we could build something useful here, because the Wi-Fi standards themselves tell a clear story if you know how to read them.

How it actually scans your network

The Wi-Fi analyser runs on your device and checks three things about whatever network you're connected to: the encryption standard, whether that standard is current, and whether the network is broadcasting its name or hiding it.

Encryption matters because older standards (WEP, WPA) can be cracked in minutes with basic tools. WPA2 and WPA3 are different animals entirely. The analyser checks which one your network is using and tells you whether you're in the safe zone or not. It also looks at whether the network name (the SSID) is being broadcast. Hidden networks aren't inherently safer, but they do suggest someone's thought about security at least a little bit.

All of this runs on your phone. We never phone home with your network names or security details. That data stays on your device, encrypted in the secure storage where we keep everything sensitive.

What you actually get when you run it

Open the Wi-Fi analyser in Shield and it takes seconds. Your current network appears with a simple verdict: safe, caution, or unsafe. The report shows you why. If you're on WPA3 with broadcast disabled and a decent signal strength, you'll see green. If you're on an ancient WEP network (this still happens), you'll see red with a clear explanation of what that means.

We built this for people who move between networks constantly. Remote workers. Parents checking whether their kids' schools have decent Wi-Fi security. Small business owners managing BYOD devices for their team. The kind of person who thinks about security but doesn't need to become a network engineer to understand the result.

The report isn't just a score, either. It tells you what standard you're on, what signal strength you're getting, and honestly, whether you should be sending sensitive data over this network. That last bit matters. You might be on WPA2, which is fine, but if the signal is weak and the network is crowded, you've got other problems.

Why we didn't build it as a VPN

Early on, someone on the team asked whether we should just recommend a VPN and call it done. We didn't, for a few reasons. First, VPNs hide your traffic but they don't fix a bad network. If the Wi-Fi itself is compromised, a VPN helps, but you're adding latency and trusting a third party with your data instead of the café owner.

Second, most people don't know which VPN to trust. We built the analyser because we wanted to give you information first. Then you can decide whether you want to use a VPN, whether you want to avoid that network entirely, or whether you want to just stop sending sensitive data over it. The tool is about clarity, not dependency.

What the analyser does do is let you see your network's real security posture. That's the foundation. Everything else follows from knowing what you're actually connected to.

The difference between knowing and guessing

The reason I'm talking about this now is because we keep seeing users who've never checked their home Wi-Fi security. They assume it's fine because they set a password years ago. Sometimes it is fine. Sometimes they're on WPA (the original, not WPA2) because that's what their router defaulted to in 2015 and no one's looked at the settings since.

The Wi-Fi analyser is a Shield feature because it's part of the bigger picture. You get your security score, you run the breach check, you look at your app permissions, and you run the Wi-Fi analyser on your home network. Suddenly you've got a real sense of where the gaps actually are.

We're not here to scare people. We're here to stop them guessing. Guessing is what gets people into trouble. Knowing, acting, and checking again is what keeps them safe.