Ambit
Find out what's on your network, what's on the air nearby, and what's wrong with it. Five tools in one Android app.
It's in final testing and not on Google Play yet, and I'd rather not name a date I might miss. What already runs is the data behind it: the databases Ambit identifies devices with get rebuilt and republished every week, and you can fetch the manifest yourself if you want to check.
The desktop companion runs today
A phone can only see so much — Android won't let an app read another device's hardware address, and a desktop will. On the same network that's the difference between naming 21 of 40 devices and naming 39 of 41.
A standalone program for Windows and Linux with its own Java runtime built in, so there's nothing to install first. It isn't signed, and the page below walks through every warning you'll get and how to check the download before you run it.
Network
Ambit sweeps whichever subnet you're on and then tries to work out what each address actually is. A single lookup usually isn't enough, so it collects evidence from several directions and weighs it up: the hardware address prefix, whatever services answer, the names a device broadcasts about itself, how it reacts to being poked. The app calls these clues.
You end up with something like this:
| Device | Vendor | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| ARRIS TG2492LG-85 Router | ARRIS Group Inc. | 14 clues |
| TP-Link Deco 60 | TP-Link Technologies | 9 clues |
| envoy | Enphase Energy | 15 clues |
| (unidentified) | Espressif Inc. | 5 clues |
When Ambit can't name something it says so instead of guessing, and there's a filter for exactly those. In my experience they're worth a look.
Wi-Fi
Every network in range. There's a channel-occupancy chart so you can see who you're competing with, a live signal meter that's meant for walking around a building, and a survey mode if you want to record what you found where.
Nearby: Bluetooth and NFC
Bluetooth Classic and Low Energy, so headphones, watches, trackers, car systems, sensors. You can read NFC tags and write them. Then there's a third tab that's there for a completely different reason.
Following me
Trackers are cheap and small and easy to forget about. This tab watches which Bluetooth devices keep turning up as you move around, which is roughly how you tell a tracker riding in your bag from the neighbour's television.
GPS
A sky plot of the satellites currently overhead and what each constellation is contributing. Handy when a device insists it knows where it is and is clearly wrong.
Security
This is the tab that gives you something to act on. Every finding explains what's wrong, why it matters and what to do about it. Two real examples, in the app's own words:
WPS is enabled. Ziggo7823549 advertises WPS. The eight-digit PIN can be brute forced in hours, and doing so reveals the Wi-Fi password itself — the strength of that password makes no difference.
Turn WPS off in the router settings.
Windows file sharing (SMB) is reachable. Port 445 is open on 192.168.178.133. File sharing is exposed to everything on this network, including guests.
Share only what you intend to, and require a password.
Watch this network
Ambit can keep checking in the background and tell you when a device it's never seen before joins. You pick the interval, anywhere from fifteen minutes to six hours.
The app is upfront about what that's worth. Android won't run background work more often than every fifteen minutes and will happily delay it further to save power, so treat the interval as the earliest it might run rather than a promise. It also skips a run on mobile data or a low battery.
Where the identification comes from
Three public sources: the IEEE hardware-address registry, Rapid7's Recog fingerprint collection, and the Connectivity Standards Alliance list of certified Matter vendors. I rebuild them weekly and publish them as static files, each with a checksum.
All three also ship inside the app, so it works offline and the weekly fetch is only there to keep things current. Recog is redistributed under BSD-2-Clause with its licence attached; there's a page for that.