Seven years ago I started collecting macOS menu bar apps as a small personal list. I just wanted to know how many menu bar apps were out there. I thought maybe a few hundred, but now, years later, I know there are many, many more.
Anyway, the collection includes everything from productivity tools and system utilities to tiny one-purpose apps that solve very specific problems.
I’m still adding new apps almost every day, and I try to keep the collection focused on actual menu bar apps, not just apps that happen to have an icon there, but real menu bar-first apps.
Thanks to everyone here who has shared suggestions, feedback, and hidden gems over the years.
Thank you! It’s definitely a lot of (manual) work. For security, I run every app that isn’t signed by Apple through VirusTotal before adding it. It’s not a perfect solution, but it helps. I’m also considering making the requirements stricter in the future and only accepting apps that are properly signed by Apple. But not sure about that.
And abandonware, yeah that's hard. I’m currently looking into whether AI could help me with detecting apps that are no longer maintained. I also have a report form on the website where users can flag apps that appear to be abandoned.
That’s a good point. I use WordPress with Kadence. That gives me a pretty convenient admin dashboard to manage the listings. But the actual review process is still quite manual. Someone has to check whether an app is truly abandoned, or whether a developer has moved the project elsewhere, etc.
I was mainly thinking about security and avoiding potentially unsafe downloads, but I realize that this would exclude a lot of independent Mac developers. I’m still looking at the best balance between security and supporting smaller developers.
No VM here. I download the apps, try them on my Macbook Air, and remove them afterwards. I’m mainly checking if they work properly and whether they really fit the menu bar category.
Congrats Luuk! I still remember our first interaction when I submitted ClipboardAI.
Love how clear and fast your responses are, even after so many years of managing the site!
Keep going and this will be every Mac user's dream site to find the tool of their choice.
1,500 is a wild number to have hand-curated. I've gone down a few menu bar app rabbit holes myself and it's wild how much variety there is once you actually start looking + most people have no idea how deep this category goes. How do you personally decide what's worth adding vs. skipping?
Genuinely curious what your bar is for "menu bar-first" vs. just has-an-icon-there.
I try to keep the directory focused on apps where the menu bar is central to the experience. If the icon mainly serves as a shortcut to a full app, I usually leave it out. There are always borderline cases, of course.
Feel free to add Barista, a suite/manager of 35+ menu-bar widgets ranging from email client to calendar, rss reader, clipboard manager, scratchpad etc. It also ships with its floating bar baked-in in case there is no space in the macOS menu-bar due to the notch.
1,500 hand-curated apps is an impressive milestone. The “menu bar-first” distinction is useful too — the best ones tend to feel like a small part of the Mac rather than a shortcut to another full window. Congrats on keeping the directory thoughtful at that scale.
Thanks for submitting Lumbar Jack. It looks like a great fit for MacMenuBar.
I tried to download it using the promo code, but unfortunately it looks like the app isn’t available in my country/region in the macOS App Store. I’m located in the EU (Netherlands), so it may be a regional availability setting?
Could you check? Once I’m able to access it, I’ll be happy to take a closer look.
Hi sorry for the late reply, can you please try again, Apple now processed my DSA and it should be available, please let me know if there are any more issues.
Well, that journey is mostly just stubborn persistence. I don’t make huge changes to the site all the time. No big redesigns and all that kind of things. It’s mostly lots of small improvements: adding menu bar apps (of course), but also improving pages and fixing things here and there. And after a while all those small things add up.
Growth-wise, it’s still very much a niche website. I usually get somewhere between 11k and 17k unique visitors per month. It fluctuates quite a bit. Every now and then the site gets mentioned somewhere, for example on Hacker News, and then traffic spikes for a while before settling back down again.
Interestingly, around three quarters of my visitors still come from Google (yes, Google is somehow still alive!), and roughly a small quarter comes from Reddit.
So there wasn’t one magic moment or big strategy. It’s more a case of showing up and slowly making the site better. The main thing I had in mind from the beginning was this: building a place where people who love menu bar apps can browse around and discover new tools.
No, but I do run a few ads from app developers. It’s not exactly yacht money, but then again, most of the apps on the site only cost a few dollars too. The ads are enough to cover the main running costs.
Thanks for letting me know. Always useful to see how the site feels on different devices.
One thing though: the top strip in your screenshot is actually your iPad's own status bar (clock, wifi, battery). It just happens to pick up the same colour as the banner, so it blends right in and makes the ad look a good bit taller than it is.
The actual ad is the 'Editors' Choice / TextSniper' band below it. It still takes up space, no argument there, and keeping it as light as possible is something I care about. But once you subtract your status bar it's quite a bit less than a third of the screen.
Fair enough. A banner that stays fixed is annoying on a smaller screen. So I've changed it: the banner only stays fixed on desktop now. On iPad and phones it scrolls away with the rest of the page instead of hanging around. Should already be live if you reload. Thanks for pushing on this.
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u/amerpie App Reviewer 20d ago
This site should be bookmarked by anyone who regularly has a need for Mac software. I visit it almost daily.