What changed

• 1.0.0 · 21 August 2026 · current

  1.0 — Airward is finished enough to call finished

  Nothing in this release is a rewrite. 1.0 marks the point where the app does what the site says it does, on real networks, without needing an explanation — the detection is quiet when it should be, the interface follows your Mac’s appearance, and every release is signed and notarized by Apple.

  • Device inventory with vendor, device type, open ports and per-device history.
  • Trust and label devices; randomised MAC addresses recognised rather than reported as new strangers.
  • Rogue access point and evil-twin detection, security-downgrade checks, and association-anomaly heuristics.
  • Light and dark appearance, following macOS or pinned in Settings.
  • Event timeline, native notifications, and a first scan that establishes your network’s baseline instead of alarming about it.
  • Universal build for Apple Silicon and Intel. Runs unprivileged — no admin password, no kernel extension.

  Built by PXL Security.

• 0.4.0 · 21 August 2026

  Light and dark themes, and a rebuilt interface

  • Light and dark appearance. Airward now follows your Mac, or you can pin it under Settings → Appearance. Light is not an inversion — the signal and alert colours are re-tuned so they still hold contrast on a pale background.
  • Rebuilt interface. A header that leads with the network you are actually on, a three-up readout of what is present, trusted and unaccounted for, device rows that show presence and trust in a single mark, and an event timeline laid out as a sequence rather than a table.
  • Devices have readable names. An unlabelled device used to be listed by its MAC address. It now reads as “Reolink camera” or “Unknown phone”, with the hardware address kept as the subtitle.
  • Wi-Fi events describe themselves. A rogue access point detection previously appeared in the timeline as the literal text “rogue_ap”. Security downgrades, deauthentication anomalies and the first-run baseline were all affected too.
  • Notifications are no longer initialised until they are used, which also makes the app start marginally faster.
• 0.3.0 · 21 August 2026

  First public release

  The first build distributed outside private testing: Developer ID signed, notarized and stapled by Apple.

  • Device inventory with vendor, device type, open ports and per-device history.
  • Trust and label devices; randomised MAC addresses are recognised rather than reported as new strangers.
  • Rogue access point and evil-twin detection, with security-downgrade checks.
  • Event timeline, and native notifications for new devices and anomalies.
  • Universal build for Apple Silicon and Intel; runs unprivileged, no admin password.

  Fixed before release, from testing on real networks:

  • First run no longer floods you with alerts. On a normal office network the first scan produced 85 notifications in under two minutes — one per device and one per access point of a mesh SSID. The first scan is now treated as your network’s baseline, and only what appears afterwards raises an alert. An intruder arrives after the baseline by definition, so detection is unaffected.
  • Evil-twin severity was understated. Escalation to high severity required a manually trusted access point, which almost nobody sets up — so an open access point cloning the WPA2 network you were on was reported as merely medium. The network you are actually connected to now counts toward the security baseline.
  • Setup is now a real window. First-run permissions lived inside the menu-bar popover, so a new user saw nothing and had to discover the status item to learn that Wi-Fi checks were not yet working.
  • Location access could not be recovered. Declining the first prompt left the app permanently unable to read your network’s name, with no way back — macOS never asks twice. There is now a control that takes you straight to the right settings pane, and the app explains when an update has reset the grant.
  • A stale state file could silently disable the app. After a crash or force-quit the app could connect to an engine that was no longer running and sit there showing nothing. It now verifies the engine is alive rather than trusting a file left behind.

Airward follows semantic versioning. Updates are not automatic yet — new releases are announced here and at the download page.