It may work for you, and I hope it helps, but it’s supplied as general information, no warranties, if something goes wrong and your Mac sucks the universe into a singularity, don’t come crying to me. So here’s what I did, in detail, to get it working. Android works for Wi-Fi flawlessly, but plug in an Android phone to your High Sierra Mac and enable it, and you’re likely to be met with a big flat nothing. It’s actually a carrier thing, to be fair to my roaming partner, but it sucks having paid for data to find that you can’t use it except on your device, so iOS was out. My problem (and it could well be yours) is that my roaming SIM provider doesn’t always allow for any tethering (Wi-Fi hotspot or USB tethering) on iOS in some countries. Now, from a practical viewpoint, this is much easier if you’ve got an iPhone.Īpple stuff talks to Apple stuff pretty natively, to the shock of nobody. The solution: Pair up the phone over a USB cabled connection instead. That’s the situation I’m about to find myself in at a conference with many other tech journalists. All of a sudden, your smartphone’s link to your laptop isn’t worth much, as it struggles to connect, or send any meaningful quantity of data packets. Within the oddities of Wi-Fi on both Macs and Droids, it all works pretty well.Įxcept when it doesn’t, like for example if you find yourself in an area with a lot of Wi-Fi saturation. If you’ve got a Mac running High Sierra (or, as far as I can gather, Sierra, although that’s not the case I’ve tested for), you can pair up an Android smartphone by sharing over Wi-Fi. Or in other words, I could have used this stuff earlier so I figure you might benefit as well.

I’m writing this guide largely because I’ve just taken a few hours to work this out myself, and while I can’t take credit for every step, I couldn’t find all these instructions in one place. It is possible to use an Android handset in USB tethered mode with a Mac running High Sierra, although there are a few hoops to jump through.

Android to mac usb tethering