Tether iPhone off Mac's wifi?

TidBITS Talk
1

Is there any simple way to do that using an iOS 13 iPhone SE and a HS MBP? I’m thinking either over Bluetooth or USB.

I often travel only to find fancy hotel wifi to be rather flimsy. My Mac is usually much better at picking up decent wifi than my iPhone (at least my “new” SE is better than my old 6). Not really a suprise considering antenna size and power requirements. So I was wondering if there’s any simple way to reverse tether the phone off the Mac to exploit that. Thanks to wifi calling, the phone’s usefulness depends more on good wifi than cell signal (sometimes non-existent anyway).

I’m familiar with macOS’ network sharing, but sharing wifi to Ethernet won’t help with the iPhone I suppose. :confused:

2

I just realized there is on macOS sharing to “iPhone USB”.

So how does that work? How do I select it on the iOS side? And once the cable’s connected, how do I know it’s actually working? When testing it over fast.com I see 44 MBps so I know it’s not using 3G, but is there no indication in the iPhone status bar like there is for wifi? All I see is that 1 bar of 3G is there and no more indication of wifi. To me that still doesn’t reveal if it’s trying to use 3G or actually using the USB tether.