Pulse

A network toolbox for iPhone, iPad and iPhone Duo, built for the people who get asked why the network is slow.

View on the App Store Free to download. Every network test is free; Pulse Pro adds Web check and the rest.

What it does

Thirteen tools that measure a network and then tell you what the numbers mean, and a widget and a Live Activity that keep the answer in view. Every run is kept, and every run is judged again — against today's thresholds — each time you open it.

PulseRe-walks a path continuously, so a router losing one packet in twenty stops being invisible. Choose IPv4 or IPv6 when a host has both. The timeline marks the moment your phone roamed, switched networks or brought a VPN up, so a spike has its cause beside it. Swipe a running session to pause or stop it. How it works.
WidgetA Home Screen or Lock Screen widget: is this network OK right now? The age is always shown, it checks in the background, and it follows a Pulse while one is running. How it works.
Live ActivityWhile a Pulse runs, its verdict sits on your Lock Screen, in the Dynamic Island, and on your Apple Watch's Smart Stack — no watch app needed. How it works.
Health CheckEight checks and a plain verdict: link, address, router, neighbours, DNS, internet, public address, VPN — each with its own dot under the verdict. When only IPv6 gets through, it says so in one line. How it works.
Share a sessionSend a Pulse to someone on another network as a link or a file. Sharing is free; comparing their session with yours is Pro, and shows where your two routes meet and on whose side the difference is. Your Wi-Fi name, public address and place are never in it. How it works.
CertificateExpiry, trust, hostname, chain and cipher — including whether the server sent its intermediates. With Pro, every certificate you check is watched, and Pulse warns you 30, 14, 7 and 1 days before it expires. How it works.
Web checkLoads any page the way a browser does and says where the time went: redirects, DNS, connect, TLS, the server, or everything else the page pulled in. A picture of what loaded, so a portal or a block page cannot pass for the site. Pro. How it works.
DNSA, AAAA, MX, TXT, PTR and more, with TTLs and the server that answered.
WHOISRDAP where a registry speaks it, port 43 where it does not.
PingRound trips, loss and RFC 3550 jitter, charted as they arrive.
TracerouteEvery hop, over ICMP, UDP or TCP to port 443.
Path MTUThe largest packet that gets through, believed from a router that names it and searched for when the path stays silent.
DevicesEverything else on the network: one ping to every address, named by what each one advertises, with an opt-in check for open ports on the devices you pick. How it works.
ServicesSixteen everyday services — video calls, files, sign-in and mail, remote desktop — checked against their real endpoints in about fifteen seconds, with a plain verdict and one tap to a Pulse on the worst one. How it works.
Overview & RoutesInterfaces, addresses, resolvers, the routing table, VPN and proxy state.
TerminalSSH and telnet to the hosts the other tools point at — saved hosts, keys in the Keychain, a key row above the keyboard, and one tap from a hop or a neighbour. How it works · Shell integration.

What it looks like

A live Pulse session showing latency, loss, jitter and every hop on the path
Every hop, re-measured every few seconds.
An AI diagnosis naming an IP conflict, with the evidence it reasoned from
An AI reading of the run, with its evidence.
A health check verdict with a dot for each of its eight checks, and the devices seen on the network
Eight checks, a dot each, and a plain verdict.
An SSH session in Pulse's terminal, with the key row above the keyboard
A terminal on the host you were measuring.
A certificate check showing expiry, trust, chain and cipher
Certificates, chain and all.
A DNS lookup returning sixty-three TXT records
Every record, all the details.

Made for iPhone Duo

Stand an iPhone Duo half-open, like a small laptop, and every tool splits at the fold: the path, the graphs and the reports on the standing half; the target, the controls and the keyboard on the flat half, under your thumb. Before you start, the standing half shows every tool and the sessions running now. A row just under the fold takes you back, or straight to the toolbox, from any screen. Open flat, Pulse uses the whole screen, with the toolbox beside your results. How it works.

Watch it run: a live path, then three reports.
Pulse on a half-open iPhone Duo: the toolbox on the standing half, the target and Start Pulse on the flat half
The toolbox stands up; the target lies flat.
A live Pulse on a half-open iPhone Duo: the path and the graph above the fold, the figures and the controls below
The path and the graph above the fold, the figures below.
A certificate report on the standing half of an iPhone Duo, with the next host to check on the flat half
The report up, the next host under your thumb.
A WHOIS registration on the standing half of an iPhone Duo
Every tool splits the same way.

A minute with Pulse

Also on YouTube.

The part other tools skip

When a hop reports loss, there are two different things that can be happening: the router is dropping traffic, or it is passing traffic along perfectly and merely rate-limiting its own ICMP replies. One is a fault on your path. The other is a router doing exactly what it is configured to do.

Every comparable tool paints both red. Pulse tells them apart, and says which it found.

How to read what it tells you

Pulse makes judgements — which hop is at fault, whether a certificate will outlive your maintenance window, whether a name server that is not answering matters. The manual gives the rule behind each one, so you can disagree with it knowingly.

Pulse Pro

Every network test is free, and so is the history of the last seven days. Pro adds an AI reading of a run written for a ticket, a link test between two of your own devices, two interfaces — or IPv4 and IPv6 — measured side by side with each side named and coloured, comparison of saved sessions and of a session someone shared with yours, picture and CSV export, full history synced through your own iCloud, terminal sessions that stay open while you work elsewhere, a searchable history of every command you ran on every host, a shell opened from any hop or neighbour in one tap, on Devices a name for a device that sticks, memory of what was there last time, and the port check, and on Services every endpoint's own figures, your organisation's SharePoint, Okta, Citrix and GlobalProtect checked by name, and Explain this — an AI reading of the check, Web check — where a slow page loses its time — and alerts before any certificate you checked expires — or is renewed, or breaks.