I work at Meter.

It does happen to older models as well with an updated MacOS but not as acutely as with M1/M2 Macs.

We have updated our post to make it easy to see the full source of the script involved, and we welcome PRs at https://github.com/meterup/awdl_wifi_scripts. We provide the curl command out of convenience, but we understand the trust that someone places in us when using this method. We’re also finding that IT teams are leveraging this script with tools like JAMF to address this for all of their company’s devices at once.

There unfortunately is not a way to disable awdl in the UI apart from disabling bluetooth as well, which most don’t want. An increasing number of Apple services leverage awdl[1], and it’s unlikely they envision anyone wanting to turn it off.

[1] https://owlink.org/wiki/ — note, not exhaustive ex: tethering also leverages awdl.

A previous commenter had this replicated live a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31706738 – in the video you can see how it’s triggered.

Yes, it does impact iOS and iPadOS too.

We discovered that this very same, oddly specific advice was given in many places for gaming, like in Google Stadia’s troubleshooting page : https://support.google.com/stadia/answer/9595943?hl=en#zippy...

This is a good point, we’ll make sure to update the post to note that the advice is no longer needed once Apple fixes things on their end. The script will get killed with a simple restart, so the odds of this hanging around are low.

For companies that decide to implement this or a similar solution using MDM, `sudo pkill -f /tmp/disable_awdl.sh && sudo ifconfig awdl0 up` will also disable the effects of the script.

I work at Meter.

We’ve seen this repeatedly across different types of spaces and have had teams spend similar amounts of time to get to know what’s going on underneath.

Yes, I have a solution for this. Email in profile.

Balanced is awesome. Really helpful people!