If your Mac stutters during streaming even though your network looks fine, the cause is almost always AWDL — Apple's hidden WiFi service that powers AirDrop and AirPlay. Here's what's happening and how to fix it.
AWDL stands for Apple Wireless Direct Link. It's a peer-to-peer WiFi service Apple uses for AirDrop, AirPlay, Handoff, Universal Clipboard, Sidecar, and Continuity Camera. It runs on a hidden network interface called awdl0 and is always active in the background — even when you're not using AirDrop.
To find nearby Apple devices, AWDL periodically hops your WiFi adapter to a different channel, roughly once per second. While it's on the AWDL channel, your regular WiFi traffic is paused. For most things you do on a Mac, you'd never notice — web pages, streaming video, even most games are fine with sub-second pauses.
For real-time game streaming, however, those sub-second pauses are exactly the wrong shape. They show up as jitter spikes and stutter in the Performance Overlay even when packet loss, RTT, and bitrate all look perfect.
AWDLControl is a small free menu-bar app by James Howard that lets you toggle AWDL on and off with a single click — no Terminal needed. It also re-enables AWDL automatically after reboot if you want it back.
Download the latest release from the GitHub releases page, drag it to /Applications, and use the menu-bar icon to switch AWDL off before starting a streaming session.
AWDLControl is open source — we're not affiliated with the project, just recommending it because it's the cleanest fix we've found.
If you'd rather not install a third-party app, you can disable AWDL with one Terminal command. The setting reverts on reboot, so it's safe and easily reversible.
Press ⌘ Space and type Terminal, then press Return.
Paste this command and press Return. macOS will ask for your password.
sudo ifconfig awdl0 downStart a streaming session. The stutter should be gone, and the Jit value in the Performance Overlay should drop into the green range.
When you want AirDrop / AirPlay back, run:
sudo ifconfig awdl0 upOr just reboot — AWDL comes back on automatically.
Disabling AWDL turns off all peer-to-peer Apple device features. While it's down, the following will not work:
Regular WiFi (web, streaming services, downloads), Bluetooth, and wired Ethernet are unaffected. Once you re-enable AWDL or reboot, all those features come back instantly.
If you don't want to disable AWDL, you can avoid the problem from the other side: set your router's 5 GHz channel to one that AWDL doesn't hop to. AWDL prefers channels 6, 44, 149 (depending on region), so picking a different one keeps the AWDL channel-hop from interrupting your stream.
Recommended channels:
This requires admin access to your router's settings. The exact location varies by router, but look for "Wireless settings" or "Channel" under the 5 GHz band.
Vision Pro is not affected. visionOS handles peer-to-peer WiFi differently and doesn't hop the streaming adapter, so AWDL never interferes with Asobi on Vision Pro.
Apple TV: the simplest and most reliable fix is to connect Apple TV to your router with an Ethernet cable. AWDL only affects WiFi, so wired Apple TV streams are immune. Wired also gives you the lowest latency and the steadiest jitter on tvOS in general — we recommend it whenever your setup allows it.
iPhone and iPad: the same channel-hopping happens, but it's less noticeable in practice — iOS prioritises foreground network traffic more aggressively than macOS. iOS doesn't expose a way to disable AWDL, so if you're seeing stutter, the router-channel fix above is the available workaround.
For diagnosing the underlying issue on any platform, the Performance Overlay is the place to start — the Jit metric is the direct readout of this kind of timing variance.
If disabling AWDL didn't fix it, the cause is something else — capture a short screen recording with the Performance Overlay visible during a bad moment and send it our way:
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