You may have seen a notification about an iPhone app requesting LAN access and wondered what it was.

Some features of your apps may require access to view other devices on your Wi-Fi network, such as speakers or set-top boxes, in order to be able to stream video or audio content.

But not every app needs these permissions, and you might be interested to learn about them and want to disable some of them.

You can change the LAN access of an app on iPhone by going to Settings > Privacy & Security > LAN > then turning app access on or off.

How to enable or disable local network access for iPhone app

  1. I open Settings.
  2. Select Privacy and Security.
  3. Select LAN.
  4. Click the button next to an app to enable or disable access.

Our guide continues below with more information on setting up iPhone LAN access, including pictures of the steps.

Your iPhone’s ability to interact with other devices in your home can be really rewarding and fun.

For example, if you have the Alexa app, you can use it to stream music to Echo devices or turn on or off lights connected to smart plugs.

In these situations, it makes sense that the app would need access to your local network. In fact, at some point you may have seen a popup asking you to grant access to an app.

But LAN access pop-ups on your iPhone are becoming more and more common because other apps need to access your network, and some may not.

Our guide below will show you where to find this setting so you can see which apps don’t have LAN access from your iPhone so you can change that access as needed.

Related: Our iPhone Tools Folder article can give you more information about this location if you’re trying to find it.

How to grant or remove LAN access to the iPhone app

The steps in this article were done on an iPhone 13 running iOS 16.

Step 1: Find the Settings icon on the home screen and select it to open the menu.

I open Settings

Step 2: Scroll down and select the “Privacy and Security” option.

Select Privacy and Security

Step 3: Select the “Local Network” option.

How to change LAN permissions on iPhone

Step 4: Click the button to the right of the application to enable or disable its access to your local network devices.

I have disabled network access for Hulu in the image below.

Click the button to change LAN permissions

Now that you know how to find and change your apps’ iPhone network settings, you can control which of your apps can see information about other devices on your network.

More information about accessing LAN on iPhone

You can change the network access settings for an app at any time.

Please note that some features of the app may not work properly if you turn off network access. For example, in the above section, you disabled network access for the Hulu app. This means that I won’t be able to stream a movie or TV show from the Hulu app on my iPhone to my TV or streaming device until I turn it back on.

There are plenty of other settings you can change as well in the Privacy and Security menu. This includes things like apps that have access to features like:

  • Contacts
  • calendars
  • reminder
  • picture
  • bluetooth
  • close interactions
  • microphone
  • speech recognition
  • camera
  • health
  • and more

For example, if you have Instagram or TikTok on your iPhone and you disable camera access, you won’t be able to use the camera feature within those apps to post content.

Many apps on your iPhone will only request access to certain features and apps they need, but others have more permissions than you probably need. It might be a good idea to go through these lists and disable unnecessary access to some things.