I build PingKit because the network is where most everyday tech problems actually live: slow WiFi, a device you don't recognise, a connection that keeps dropping. The tools for understanding it were either enterprise-heavy, ad-riddled, or quietly shipping your data somewhere.
My background is in DevOps and systems engineering, keeping infrastructure reliable, observable, and secure. PingKit brings that same discipline to your home network: the diagnostics you'd expect from professional tooling, wrapped in an interface that explains what it finds in plain language. Everything that can run on your device does. There are no accounts, no ads, and no third-party analytics SDKs harvesting your activity. The only usage data collected is anonymous, aggregate counts of which features get used, with no identifier attached.
Why privacy-first isn't a marketing line here
Network data is some of the most revealing data there is. It describes every device you own and how you use them. That's exactly why PingKit keeps it on your device and syncs it only through your own private iCloud database, which even I can't see. Discovery and security scoring happen entirely on your device. So does device identification, most of the time, and when the on-device classifier is genuinely unsure it can ask PingKit's own service for help, carrying the name the device broadcasts about itself. The same is true of AI answers: they are written on your device or by Apple Private Cloud Compute wherever they can be, and PingKit's own service is the last resort. It asks your permission before it ever receives anything, and you can take that permission back. I would rather describe that exactly than round it down to "everything stays local", because that would not be true.