A small native macOS Control Center switch for Apple Wireless Direct Link (AWDL).
- AWDL On / highlighted: allow AWDL for AirDrop and Continuity. macOS manages the interface normally.
- AWDL Off: immediately lower
awdl0and keep it down until you turn AWDL on again. - Your choice survives closing the app, logging out, restarting the helper, and restarting your Mac.
- There is no Game Mode, foreground-app detection, network-type switching, or permanent app menu bar icon.
The selected state is the policy, not a claim that AWDL has an active peer connection. Off can make AirDrop and other features that use AWDL unavailable.
AWDL Toggle efficiently automates keeping the
awdl0interface down by monitoring network route changes and immediately bringing the interface back down if some other system component tries to bring it back up.
- macOS 26 or later.
- Administrator authentication to install, repair, or uninstall the helper.
- This is a local, ad-hoc-signed build for your own Mac. No Apple Developer membership is needed. It is not a notarized distribution for other users.
Requires Xcode 26 or later and Python 3 for project generation and packaging.
Scripts/build.sh
Scripts/test.sh
python3 Scripts/package.py
python3 Scripts/verify-package.py
open dist/AWDL-Toggle.pkgComplete macOS Installer's administrator authentication. The package installs AWDL Toggle.app in Applications and its persistent helper. If macOS presents an approval for the background item, allow it in System Settings → General → Login Items & Extensions.
Then open Control Center → Edit Controls, search for AWDL, add the control, and select its small circular size. macOS owns the control's Liquid Glass appearance, sizing, placement, and refresh lifecycle.
To put AWDL in the menu bar, use Edit Controls and drag it from the controls gallery to the menu bar. This works without a “Copy to Menu Bar” context-menu command. See Apple’s menu bar instructions.
You can close the setup app. The helper, rather than the app or widget process, maintains the setting.
Fresh installations default to On. Upgrades and repairs preserve AWDL Toggle's saved setting. Disable any other AWDL-management utility before using this app.
Open AWDL Toggle from Applications to see the selected policy, helper status, and any enforcement error. The window updates automatically when another control changes AWDL and reconnects automatically if the helper restarts. A control read fails instead of inventing an On/Off value when the helper or interface is unavailable.
- Repair… opens the bundled repair installer. It reinstalls the helper and refreshes the allowed client signatures while preserving the setting.
- Uninstall… opens the bundled removal package. First remove your AWDL placements using the context menus in Control Center and the menu bar. The package stops the app and its extension, unregisters their bundles, restores AWDL, and removes the app, helper, state, and launchd plist. It then reloads the signed-in user’s widget and Control Center hosts. macOS may retain a disabled placement if you did not remove it first.
- macOS Installer calls the removal action Install and requests administrator authentication. The uninstaller’s introduction and conclusion explain that it removes AWDL Toggle.
- The same uninstaller is available as
dist/AWDL-Toggle-Uninstall.pkg.
Use the uninstaller rather than only dragging the app to Trash: this local installation uses a persistent system LaunchDaemon.
If the saved state is corrupt, Repair preserves it as state.invalid.<timestamp>.plist and resets AWDL to On so the app can recover. Valid settings are retained.
After rebuilding, reinstall the full installer. The privileged helper deliberately rejects old or uninstalled builds whose signatures are not in its administrator-owned allowlist.
If the native control changes appearance but the window and CLI still show the old setting, the widget extension may have failed to launch. After an extension filename change, macOS can retain its previous executable path in the widget host. Restarting that host clears the stale entry:
pkill -u "$(id -u)" -x chronodmacOS automatically relaunches the host; other widgets may briefly reload too. Reopen Control Center and verify a toggle against the window or CLI status.
The installed app's executable also supports these commands without opening a window:
'/Applications/AWDL Toggle.app/Contents/MacOS/AWDL Toggle' --status
'/Applications/AWDL Toggle.app/Contents/MacOS/AWDL Toggle' --on
'/Applications/AWDL Toggle.app/Contents/MacOS/AWDL Toggle' --offCommands use the same authenticated XPC service as the native control. --status prints the saved policy, monitor health, and current interface flag as JSON. If the interface is not present yet, interfaceUp is null.
The Objective-C helper uses AF_ROUTE + SIOCSIFFLAGS. A serial dispatch queue handles route events, commands, and persistence. It sleeps between events rather than polling periodically. It preserves unrelated interface flags, tolerates interface absence during boot, validates route-message lengths, and restarts through launchd if its route source fails.
Turning On raises the interface once, then releases normal interface management to macOS. Turning Off saves the policy and applies it immediately, then re-applies it on interface changes. When the interface is missing, the saved choice is applied when it appears. An orderly helper unload restores the interface; the saved policy still applies on the next start.
The SwiftUI control extension uses ControlWidgetToggle, ControlValueProvider, and a Boolean SetValueIntent. It has one narrowly scoped sandbox exception for the helper's Mach service. Its requests return only after the helper has persisted and attempted the change. Neither UI stores a second copy of the policy.
The local installer writes the final app and extension's code-signature hashes to a root-owned allowlist. The helper checks incoming clients against those signatures. Its only remote operations are read status and set AWDL policy. It does not execute commands, accept paths, or expose arbitrary network interfaces.
| Component | Location |
|---|---|
| App and control | /Applications/AWDL Toggle.app |
| Helper | /Library/PrivilegedHelperTools/local.vitaly.AWDLToggle.Helper |
| LaunchDaemon | /Library/LaunchDaemons/local.vitaly.AWDLToggle.Helper.plist |
| Root-owned state and client allowlist | /Library/Application Support/AWDL Toggle |
Logout, sleep/wake, and reboot checks passed in maintainer testing. See validation notes for tested behavior and outstanding live checks.
The event-driven monitoring implementation is adapted from James Howard’s AWDLControl revision e54f7922ee5eebb3729e8ad76fd0440a3b3650d9, under the MIT license.