Is There a Starlink App for Mac?
Short answer: SpaceX doesn't make one. The official Starlink app is iOS and Android only. There's no Mac version, and the official status page the dish used to serve at its local address has been largely disabled since 2024. If you want to monitor your Starlink properly from your Mac, you need third-party software.
The good news is that everything your dish knows is available over your local network, and there's now a native macOS app built specifically to read it: Nexus Telemetry. This page explains what's possible on a Mac, what the options are, and what you actually get.
Why isn't there an official Mac app?
Starlink's app is designed for setup and quick checks: point it at the sky during install, run a speed test, see whether you're online. That's a phone job, so SpaceX built it for phones. They've shown no sign of building desktop software, and the basic status page the dish itself used to serve in a browser has largely been retired.
But the dish itself doesn't care what's asking. It exposes a detailed telemetry stream on your local network, the same data the phone app draws from, with more detail than the app surfaces in its normal view. Any application on your network can read it, including one running on your Mac.
What you can monitor from a Mac
With the right software, your Mac can show you everything the dish reports in real time:
- Obstruction: the live percentage and the full sky map, built up over time
- Latency, download, upload, and drop rate: charted continuously, not just a one-off speed test
- Power consumption: real average draw, useful for off-grid and marine setups
- Dish alignment: tilt, azimuth, elevation, and any changes to them
- Connection health and outage history: a recorded log, not a momentary snapshot
- The likely satellite you're connected to: inferred from the dish's pointing direction and live orbital data
None of this requires a Starlink account, a login, or any cloud service. It all happens locally between your Mac and the dish. One exception worth knowing: Starlink removed dish GPS from the local API in May 2026, so location now needs an alternative source. (What the GPS removal means, and how to work around it →)
The options for Mac users
Run command-line tools. Open-source projects like starlink-grpc-tools will query the dish from a terminal, and they run on macOS. If you're comfortable on the command line and want to build your own dashboards, this is a capable free route, but it's a project, not an app.
Use Nexus Telemetry. This is the native option: a proper macOS application, Apple Silicon and Intel, that connects to your dish, reads the telemetry, and presents all of the above in real time, with recording, charts, and alerts built in. No setup beyond launching it on the same network as your Starlink. It was the first cross-platform desktop app built for exactly this, and the same app runs on Windows and Linux too.
Getting started on macOS
- Make sure your Mac is on the same network as your Starlink (connected to the Starlink router, or a network that can reach the dish).
- Download Nexus Telemetry for Mac and open it.
- It auto-detects the dish and starts streaming telemetry immediately.
There's a free trial, so you can see your own dish's real data before deciding. If you've ever wondered what the phone app isn't telling you, this is the quickest way to find out.
A note on what the phone app hides
It's worth seeing this in action. We once caught a dish quietly spin around 190° and lie almost flat after a firmware update. The official app showed nothing wrong, while the desktop telemetry recorded the whole event, even though the connection itself carried on unaffected. That's the difference between a status light and actual monitoring: not drama, just visibility into what your dish is really doing.
