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Daisuke Nishihama (西濱大将)
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How To Enable Android USB Tethering On M1 Mac

Table of Contents

Introduction
#

At some point, Macs quit supporting USB tethering.

WiFi tethering is faster than Bluetooth tethering, but it drains the battery. This was a significant bottleneck. I still wanted to use USB tethering, so I lowered the security level of my Mac and attempted to build my own build for my environment to support USB tethering.

My environment
#

  • Macbook Air 2020 (M1 Chip, Ventura 13.3.1)
  • Android phone: Galaxy S21

Procedure
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1. lower the security level
#

Boot your Mac into Recovery Mode and open Terminal.

Press and hold Touch ID (power button) for a few seconds and wait until you see “Loading boot options” and the boot disk selection screen will appear.

m1-recovery-mode1

Select “Options” next to “Macintosh HD.”

image-20231214001538042

Select Terminal and type the following command.

csrutil enable --without kext

Then press y, press allow, and enter your password.

image-20231214001706641

Once this is done, close Terminal, select “Startup Security Utility” and choose “Security Policy.”

image-20231214001854183

Then, give them all permissions.

Now you have reduced the security level.

2. build HoRNDIS using Xcode
#

First, download the HoRNDIS source code.

git clone --recursive https://github.com/jwise/HoRNDIS.git

Go into the downloaded directory and type the build command.

cd HoRNDIS
xcodebuild -sdk macosx -configuration Release

When I tried to build, I got the following error in my environment.

xcode-select: error: tool 'xcodebuild' requires Xcode, but active developer directory '/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools' is a command line tools instance

So, install Xcode here and go to [Xcode] → [Preferences…] on the menu bar and select [Locations…]. and select [Locations] from [Xcode] → [Preferences…] in the menu bar, and select the appropriate one for [Command line Tools:] in Xcode. Now you can build.

When the build is done, let’s copy it to the extensions directory.

sudo cp -rv build/Release/HoRNDIS.kext /Library/Extensions/

Now you can approve the HoRNDIS kernel from Settings > Privacy and Security, reboot, and you can use USB tethering.

image-20231214002801441