How to Run Ping (Network Diagnostics) on Your iPhone

How solid is your iPhone’s Internet connection? There’s no quick, built-in way to tell. You can look at your Wi-Fi or cellular bars to see if you have a good signal, but that doesn’t mean you have a solid connection.

Enter Pingify, created by Connectify. This free iPhone and iPad app works the same way as ping, a classic command-line utility you might run on a Windows, Mac, or Linux PC. It sends short messages (“pings”) to a remote server over your Internet connection and shows you how fast those messages are received.

By watching the ping results, you can see the precise latency of the connection. You can also spot packet loss, which appears as some of the pings just failing. And, if latency is okay on some of the pings but often increases, that shows you’re experiencing latency spikes. Any problems could either be a result of your Wi-Fi or cellular signal strength, or a result of the Internet connection itself.

You can also use Pingify to test your iPhone’s Wi-Fi or cellular signal strength, starting a ping and walking around an area. You might notice that some areas of your home, workplace, or anywhere else have a worse signal. It’s easy to spot dead spots or other bad areas if you’re staring at the ping results while walking around.

Download Pingify from Apple’s App Store and launch it to get started. Tap the “Start Test” button on the main Pingify tab. Pingify will automatically start pinging over both your Wi-Fiand cellular data connections. It will send pings over your VPN, too, if you’re connected to a VPN. Pingify won’t stop until you tap “Stop Test.”

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The Analyze tab in the app shows you a history of your Pingify test results along with the geographical location where you performed them. Pingify normally sends pings to google.com, but you can change that server from the Settings tab. If Google’s servers have a problem, that will impact your ping results—but Google normally has fast servers with solid connections.

This tool will be immediately familiar to anyone who’s ever run a ping command. If you haven’t, it’s still a great way of seeing how well your connection is working at the moment. If a web page or app is ever loading slowly on your phone, run a test in Pingify. This will tell you whether you have a connection problem or if that particular web page or app is just slow.