How to enable USB tethering on your Android phone to Mac OS X Lion

I want to tether an unlimited data plan on a Nexus S (with Android 2.3.6) via USB cable to a MacBook Air (with OS X Lion). Both on Windows and Ubuntu, it works like a charm, so I'm wondering if there's something I can do it OSX to make it work.

1. The articles I read imply that given Apple's restrictions, it's imposible and OSX only supports tethering an iPhone via USB.

2. On Android Enthusiasts, I found a a couple of solutions:

   1. one tethering from Froyo and
   2. one tethering on a Snow Leopard,

but they all rely on third party Android apps. Is there any hack to make OSX work with it out of the box?

Solution 1:

The following app has a very detailed setup guide that you need to follow carefully to make usb tethering work on Android.

I've tested this with my own Nexus S (2.3.6) and Lion 10.7.2. It works great!

Also, no root access is needed.

You really have to give credit to the developers. They went as far as to write drivers for Mac OS to get this work!

https://market.android.com/details?id=com.mstream.easytether_beta&hl=en

Solution 2:

There is a native RNDIS driver for Mac OS X that allows you to use your Android phone's native USB tethering mode to get Internet access, it is called HoRNDIS: http://joshuawise.com/horndis

It is known to work with Mac OS X versions 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard) through 10.8.2 (Mountain Lion).

HoRNDIS is also available in source form on GitHub, it is licensed under the GNU General Purpose License, version 3: http://github.com/jwise/HoRNDIS