The Apple-created graphics that appear on your folders are called SF Symbols. There are thousands of them, and they're designed to stay legible in multiple sizes and weights, from tiny up to headline-sized. Apple allows you to create your own, in a process that turns out to be pretty complicated when done correctly. You're drawing potentially nine weights (Ultralight through Black) at three scales, making sure the strokes stay visually consistent at every combination, making sure the whole thing still reads as the same symbol from thin to bold, and doing it all in a way Xcode will accept without silently failing. Most people who've tried this by hand in Illustrator or Sketch will tell you it's tedious, error-prone, and genuinely difficult to keep consistent.

McKinley is a dedicated app built to solve exactly that problem. It's a vector drawing tool, but unlike a general-purpose one, it already understands the SF Symbols format: the weight system, the scale system, the export rules Xcode expects. You draw a shape once, and McKinley handles generating and keeping consistent the different weights and sizes that shape needs to become a real, working custom symbol, rather than you manually redrawing (and re-aligning) it nine times. It can start from an SVG you already have or from a blank canvas, it live-previews your symbol using Apple's actual rendering engine, so what you see is what will really show up in an app, and when you're done it exports straight into a format Xcode can use. It launched September 7, 2026, runs on macOS 15 and up, and it's made by one developer, Amy Worrall, under the name Double & Thrice Ltd.

I don't have many developer chops, so this isn't going to end up in my daily driver stack, but I was intrigued because John Gruber, from Daring Fireball, raved about McKinley as "a remarkable 1.0." Double & Thrice provided me with a reviewer's license, and I installed and tested it.

Several things were impressive. The documentation, including a list of the app's limitations, is well done. When the app encounters an issue, the error messages are descriptive and helpful. To my eyes, the symbols it creates are indistinguishable from the ones in Apple's built-in set.

The kicker is the pricing. Gruber called McKinley a serious professional tool for dev shops and graphics pros. £55 / €65 / $60, one-time. There's a 15% launch discount (down to roughly £46.75 / €55.25 / $51) through September 14, 2026, and a free 14-day trial that's described as fully functional, not a crippled demo. For a solo-developer niche tool, that's a reasonable way to let it prove itself before you pay.

Normally, I list alternatives to apps when I review them, but there doesn't seem to be anyone else making anything that does what McKinley does. That kind of original thinking is rare, so hats off to the dev.

TL;DR: Five free, mostly open-source, no-telemetry Mac utilities from this week's testing: docktor (dock widgets + hover previews), Kompakt (drag-and-drop image/video compression), TetherShot (live iPhone screen capture over USB/Wi-Fi), FolderForge (rule-based folder icon styling), and ImageFuel (import-free folder browsing with RAW support). Each gets a free alternative below if you want to compare before committing.

Removing Irritation

My app testing time this week was spent on free apps, most of them open source and all privacy-respecting. No accounts needed. No telemetry. I've been looking for original, niche apps that do one thing well.

docktor

docktor calls itself the dock you deserve. It's free, notarized, requires no account, and comes from a solo dev who regularly responds to users with new features and bug fixes. The app fills the unused side space on either end of the Dock with customizable widgets (music, calendar, weather, system stats) and adds hover previews of a running app's open windows without clicking. If you're a widget person, this gives you a few new options.

Alternative: HyperDock has done Dock hover previews for years and is worth a look if that's the one feature you actually want, though it doesn't fill unused Dock space with widgets the way docktor does — check current macOS compatibility before buying, since I haven't tested it myself on this release.

Kompakt

Kompakt is a native Mac menu bar app for compressing and converting images and video with a drag-and-drop interface that pops up automatically the moment you drop a file. Images cover PNG, JPG, WebP, GIF, and SVG; video is limited to MP4, MOV, and M4V. Free and open source under MIT, distributed as a signed DMG off GitHub Releases. The dev's roadmap includes watched folders, Finder actions, and Shortcuts support. I can see setting up some helpful shortcuts using this.

Alternative: ImageOptim is the longtime free, open-source, drag-and-drop standard for image compression on Mac. It doesn't touch video, so if Kompakt's video side is what sold you, ImageOptim isn't a full swap.

TetherShot

TetherShot is a proper Mac utility, not just a menu bar toy. It captures a live display, not a simulation: your connected iPhone's actual screen over USB or Wi-Fi, saved as a pixel-perfect screenshot. Free and open source, no account, no analytics, no cloud relay. Take all the screenshots you want without syncing or AirDropping anything.

Alternative: QuickTime Player already does this for free and it's built in — connect your iPhone by cable, pick it as the camera source under File > New Movie Recording, and you can record or grab a frame of the live screen. It's a recording-first workflow rather than a one-tap screenshot, and it needs the cable; TetherShot's Wi-Fi option and one-hotkey capture are the actual time-savers if you do this often.

FolderForge

Apps that customize folder appearance in Finder have been around for a while, and they're fine for the primary folders in your home directory. If you want smart folders and reusable presets that apply by name, contents, or marker files using recursive styling, FolderForge fits the bill — it applies a visual system across an entire folder tree. Runs locally, no account, no telemetry. MIT-licensed on GitHub; v1.0.8 is signed and notarized by Apple.

Alternative: Rainbow Folder – Icon changer is a simple App Store option for changing individual folder colors and icons. It's manual, one folder at a time — it doesn't have FolderForge's rule-based, apply-to-a-whole-tree automation, so it's a fit only if you don't need the bulk styling.

ImageFuel

Point the app at any folder, or several, and instantly see every image and video in a clean, scrollable grid. No importing. No library to manage. No waiting. It reads files where they already live, including JPEG, PNG, video, and RAW. It loads quickly and makes browsing photos easy.

• Search by filename or path with a fast, keyboard-friendly search modal (Cmd+F)
• Filter to images only, videos only, or everything
• Sort by date, name, or a custom order you drag yourself; each folder remembers its own sort
• Browse RAW files from Canon, Nikon, Sony, Fujifilm, Olympus, Panasonic, Pentax, and DNG
• Open any file in a fullscreen lightbox
• Crop images with live pixel dimensions
• Apply color filters to one image or an entire batch
• Inspect and strip metadata
• Rename files in bulk
• Create subfolders from the sidebar
• Send deleted files to the Trash or a folder you choose

Alternative: XnViewMP is the free, cross-platform standard for exactly this job — instant folder-based browsing with real RAW support, no import step. It's a dated interface next to ImageFuel's cleaner grid, and it doesn't have ImageFuel's crop/metadata/batch-rename tools built into the same window, but it's the closest thing to a direct, feature-for-feature comparison if you want to try before committing to either.

Remove an Irritation

None of this is life-changing software, and none of it asks to be. Every one of these five does one narrow job, does it for free, and stays out of your way otherwise: no accounts, no telemetry, no subscription creeping in later. That's the actual differentiator this week, not any single feature. If you only try one, make it whichever solves a problem you already have — docktor if you stare at your Dock all day, ImageFuel if you're sick of importing photos just to look at them, TetherShot if you've ever emailed yourself an iPhone screenshot. The rest can wait.

Unless otherwise noted, the alternatives mentioned above are based on research and not individual testing.

Here are the best apps I tested this weekend. Two will save you time, two are fun ways to waste it on UI tweaks, and one's for a certain psychological profile. I'm sure you can figure out which one.

Holeberry - A native Swift 6 app for macOS 14 and up, built by developer Pedro Vieira, Holeberry puts the Pi-hole controls you actually use right in your menu bar. See real-time blocking status and query stats without keeping a dashboard tab open. You can disable blocking for five minutes, an hour, or indefinitely, giving you the same toggle as Pi-hole's own web UI, just one click closer. The feature that actually earns the download is per-tab unblocking. Holeberry reads the active tab in Safari, Chrome, Chromium, Firefox, or Zen, and when a site is broken because Pi-hole blocked something on the page, it can identify and allowlist that domain without making you dig through the query log yourself. That's a workflow improvement, not a cosmetic shortcut, and it's the reason to care about this app at all. (FOSS)

Dock Party - Dock Party watches Spotify or Apple Music via system audio and turns that into a light bar running along the edge of the Dock. Track name, artist, and album art appear beside it, a progress bar runs along the Dock's edge, and playback controls sit right there without requiring you to switch apps. It also adds Amplitude, Pitch, and Waveform visualizer modes, so the light bar moves with the music instead of just sitting there. ($4.99)

Neon Vision Editor - It's a text and code editor for macOS, iPhone, and iPad aimed at developers, writers, and sysadmins who value speed and a small footprint over a massive plugin ecosystem. Syntax highlighting covers Swift, Python, JS/TS, Go, Rust, SQL, Markdown, and more. There's a recursive project sidebar, Quick Open, Find in Files, a code minimap, and Git tooling for status, history, and diffs. A CSV/TSV table mode and Mac-hosted SSH remote editing round things out, and Vim keybindings are there if you want them. AI code completion exists but is opt-in, limited to minimal cursor-context text, and sent only to a provider you choose yourself. Leave it off, and the app makes no network calls at all. (Free/$4.99)

Mojibar - Mojibar replaces your Dock icon and menu bar icon with any of 3,600-plus emoji. Make sure you use this link to find the app because there's more than one out there with the same name. ($0.99)

Snick - Snick turns your trackpad into a ratchet, complete with sound and haptic feedback. That's it. That's the app. Strangely enough, it got on my radar through enthusiastic reviews. Some people need feedback from their devices. They're the ones leading the mechanical keyboard movement, using Thock for the sound effects, and they're the audience for this app.

TL;DR: Lore is a free Mac app that follows YouTube channels over plain RSS, no algorithm, no Google account, then archives what you keep as a permanent offline file with transcript search, highlights, and SponsorBlock built in. The site's source-code link 404s, so don't take open source on faith. Alternatives for readers who want a lighter touch: FreeTube (free, open source, no algorithm, no download) and Grayjay Desktop ($9.99 one time, aggregates YouTube with other platforms).

Lore Solves a Problem Neither of My Last Two Posts Could

When you find a video you want to archive, any app that merely organizes links isn't an archive at all. It's a bookmark service. There's a use for that, but if you need a quality local copy of the information, you need a proven download and catalog app. After evaluating the top contenders, I chose Lore, a native Mac app built by a solo developer, Adrian Galilea. It solves two of YouTube's problems in one place: it follows channels without an algorithm, and it keeps what you save even after YouTube stops hosting it.

Five features for power users

• The built-in browser follows channels over plain RSS. No algorithm, no home feed, no recommendations. No Google account required.
• Web ingest archives any link as one self-contained offline file, subtitles, chapters, and metadata baked in. This needs yt-dlp and ffmpeg installed separately; Lore will tell you which one is missing if you're not set up, but it doesn't install them for you. Set them up yourself ahead of time to avoid the interruption.
• Transcript search runs across your entire library, powered by SQLite full-text search. Find the video where someone actually said the thing, instead of scrolling ten channels trying to remember which one it was.
• Highlights let you mark a moment with a keystroke, edit the clip against the transcript, and export it as a standalone video file.
• SponsorBlock auto-skip, chapter markers with hover-frame previews, and full keyboard-driven navigation, all of it working offline once a video is archived, plus Spotlight, Shortcuts, and Siri actions to play, pause, skip, or archive a link without opening the app.

It's free. No purchase, no subscription, no App Store listing; support is optional through Ko-fi or GitHub Sponsors. Development has been unusually aggressive: 28 versioned releases between June 11 and July 6, 2026, most of them driven by direct user feedback.

Although the landing page on Lore's website has a link to view the source code, it 404s, pointing at a GitHub page that no longer exists. I'm not sure what that portends, but be aware of it before you install.

The feature that shall not be added

The developer has also publicly turned down adding related-content recommendations, writing that it feels at odds with the reason people use the app in the first place, and that it won't ship unless it can be done without becoming distracting. That's a stronger commitment than a marketing line; it's a maintainer talking themselves out of a feature that would have been easy to justify.

Added to my toolbox

I've been burned by a video disappearing, and I just don't trust YouTube to keep hosting things I care about. If you're on macOS 26 with Homebrew already comfortable in your workflow, Lore does more in one app than anything I've discovered while writing this series. The transcript search alone is worth the price of admission, and the price of admission is nothing.

Alternatives

FreeTube, an app I have used and recommended for years, does the algorithm half of this, and it can download individual videos too, but it stops there. Free, open source, and already reviewed here on the blog. It builds a local, unranked feed from your subscriptions using its own extractor, no Invidious required, and has been shipping steadily through 2026. The download button saves a file to disk with a choice of format and quality; what it doesn't have is anywhere to manage those files afterward. No downloads tab, no in-app library, no transcript search. You get the file; Lore gets you the file plus a permanent, searchable home for it.

Grayjay Desktop is worth a mention for a different reason: it aggregates YouTube alongside other platforms, Twitch, Odysee, PeerTube, into a single feed with no algorithm by default. One-time purchase, $9.99, from the FUTO team. Until recently, Mac build currently needed a manual terminal command to get past Gatekeeper, but the current version does not.

Unless otherwise noted, anything mentioned above beyond Lore is based on research, not testing on my end.

Who this isn't for

If you're not on macOS 26 yet, this is off the table until you are. If you don't want to install yt-dlp and ffmpeg separately, the web-ingest half of the app won't work for you out of the box. And if open-source code matters to your trust in a tool, Lore doesn't currently back up its own claim to it.

More in this series

• Post 1: YouTube Premium Kills the Ads but Doesn't Solve the Real Problem. Here's the Stack I Use to Do That.
• Post 2: How to Experience YouTube With No Algorithm
• Post 3: The Extension Aided Method of Ignoring the YouTube Algorithm

TL;DR: Play, Yattee and Unwatched all refuse to let YouTube pick your next video; each builds a feed from your subscriptions instead of Google's ranking. Play is free to download with the channel-following features behind Premium at $2.99/month, and it's the only one of the three that isn't locked to a single backend. Yattee runs through public Invidious and Piped instances, which Google has been blocking since 2024. Unwatched pulls from YouTube's own RSS feeds and Data API instead, which should make it sturdier, but needs macOS 15.

* * *

Play, Yattee and Unwatched Won't Fix YouTube's Algorithm. They Just Won't Ask It.

I wrote last time about paying for YouTube Premium after years of running my own ad-blocking stack. Premium immediately silences ads. That's the extent of its problem-solving. It didn't buy me a say in what shows up next. The recommendation engine is still running, still deciding, still doing the exact job it was built to do: keep me watching something, whether or not that something is what I came for.

That's the part no subscription fixes. The algorithm doesn't check whether you paid before it decides what to put in front of you.

So I went looking for apps that don't ask it in the first place.

Ranking happens whether you pay or not

YouTube's Home tab, the sidebar, and the autoplay queue are all running the same job: predict what keeps you watching, then show you that. It works whether you're a free user with ads or a Premium subscriber without them. The engine doesn't know or care which one you are. Turning off autoplay helps. Hiding the sidebar helps. Neither one changes what's happening upstream; the feed is still built by ranking, and ranking is still the thing making the decision.

The only way around that is a feed that isn't ranked at all. Something that shows you new uploads from channels you follow, in the order they were posted, and stops there.

The obvious solution has been in front of me for a while.

Play

I've used Play for over two years and reviewed it previously.

Play started as a save-for-later app. Give it a video URL through the clipboard or Share Sheet and it builds a personal video database that you can organize with tags and other metadata.

That's still useful, but Play has grown into something more interesting.

With Play Premium, you can follow YouTube channels directly. Each channel can have its own filters, so following somebody doesn't have to mean accepting everything they publish. If a creator covers five subjects and you only care about one, Play can filter the incoming videos before they reach you.

That turns subscriptions into something much closer to RSS.

The Channels section becomes a continuously updated timeline of new videos from sources you deliberately selected. There is no recommendation engine sitting between the publisher and you.

The part that makes Play different from Yattee and Unwatched: the in-app player isn't locked to one backend. You can play through Invidious, through Piped, through a custom site you point it at, or straight through YouTube itself. If you go the YouTube route directly, you can hide Shorts. That means Play doesn't live or die by whether a given Invidious instance is up this week; it's a hedge built into the app instead of a single point of failure.

The catch is price.

Play is free to download, but the channel-following features that make it especially useful for this workflow require **Play Premium at $2.99/month, $19.99/year or $99.99 lifetime**.

It's a universal app with iCloud sync, so the same subscriptions follow you from iPhone to Mac to AppleTV.

Mac App Store

Yattee

Yattee is a free, open source SwiftUI app for Mac, iOS and tvOS that plays YouTube through Invidious or Piped, two open source front ends that stand between you and Google's servers. You point Yattee at an instance, add channels as favorites, and it builds a feed from exactly those channels; nothing else. SponsorBlock and Return YouTube Dislike are built in.

Everything depends on those instances staying up. Google has been blocking Invidious instances at the IP level since 2024, and that fight was still going on through 2026, with public instances getting hit with CAPTCHAs, throttling and outright blacklisting. Piped has reportedly held up better under the same pressure, but neither is infrastructure you control. Unlike Play, Yattee has no fallback to YouTube directly if your instance goes down; the proxy is the only door.

I don't like the friction Invidious introduces. More than once, the few minutes I set aside to watch videos have been consumed with fixing a buggy back end. If your experience has been different, Yattee is popular for a reason. Use it and enjoy. It's just not for me.

Mac App Store

Unwatched

Unwatched is a free, open source, native Swift app; macOS 15 or later on the Mac, iOS 17 or later on the phone. The difference from Yattee: it pulls from YouTube's own RSS feeds and the YouTube Data API instead of routing through a third party front end. That's a different kind of dependency, not zero dependency; you're still relying on Google's API staying available and its quotas staying reasonable. But you're not waiting on a volunteer-run proxy server to survive the week.

Don't charge into the Unwatched setup by adding 200 must-watch channels in one go. You'll get rate limited and frustrated.

Unwatched doesn't handle playlist organization, and the developer says as much directly in an App Store reply, pointing users toward Play. Which, at this point in the post, shouldn't surprise anyone.

You can also skip the app entirely and read the same channel feeds in a regular RSS reader. [
NetNewsWire is free and open source and will do it. Inoreader is the paid service I use and prefer, but nothing about this approach requires paying for it.

Mac App Store

Alternatives

FreeTube does the same job on the desktop side, and it's one I have used and reviewed here. It builds its feed locally from subsiptions, doesn't require Invidious to function since it has its own extractor, and has been shipping updates steadily through 2026. It's one of the few Electron apps I'd install anyway.

[Grayjay Desktop](https://grayjay.app/desktop/) belongs on this list even though I have only started testing it. It's a one-time $9.99 purchase from the FUTO team that aggregates YouTube alongside other platforms into a single unranked feed, no algorithm unless you log in. The Mac build previously needed a Gatekeeper bypass, which is the kind of friction that either doesn't bother you or ends the conversation immediately. As of this writing, it is notarized.

Grayjay is also the one app here that runs on a phone that isn't an iPhone. The license covers macOS and Android, and there's no iOS version; FUTO's own FAQ says an iPhone build isn't coming in the near future because the team is focused on making the Android app first-class. Play, Yattee and Unwatched all run on iPhone and none of them run on Android, so if your Mac sits next to a Pixel, Grayjay is the only entry on this list that follows you to both.

## Who this is for

If you want one app that follows you across every Apple device, saves videos alongside subscriptions, and doesn't put all its weight on a single third party server, Play is the one I'd point you to first. If your Mac is Apple Silicon and you don't mind depending on a proxy that Google is actively trying to kill, Yattee adds SponsorBlock and dislike counts on top of the unranked feed, free. If you're on macOS 15 and you'd rather depend on Google's official API than a volunteer's server, Unwatched is the sturdier free bet, minus playlist support.

If the algorithm mostly works for you, you're probably reading this wondering why anyone would go to this much trouble and expense to get away from something that just suggests videos. That's a fair question.

I've run all three. None of them gets you off Google's radar entirely.

## What I actually want from YouTube

There's no single app here that fixes YouTube, because the app was never the whole problem. Google still builds the feed on youtube.com; these three just stop asking it to.

No "you might also like." No endless Home feed. No algorithm deciding that because I watched one video about replacing a refrigerator water filter I have apparently developed a lifelong passion for appliance repair.

I don't actually want Google to find more things for me to watch. I already have more interesting books, movies, music, podcasts, articles and videos than I'll ever have time to consume.

The scarce resource isn't content anymore. It's attention.

So my ideal YouTube gives the algorithm as little work to do as possible.

I pick the channels. I pick the videos. I decide when I'm finished.

Then YouTube shuts up.

TL;DR: Paid for YouTube Premium after years of DIY ad-blocking. Ads are gone; the algorithm, the clutter, and the impermanence aren't. Building a stack of small tools instead of hunting for one app that fixes all four. First post in a series; toolbox preview inside, full reviews coming.

Google did not design YouTube to entertain you or to inform you. Every major design choice points toward one purpose: to make you watch more YouTube. Watching more leads to one of two outcomes: your attachment to the platform gets stronger, or you get shown more advertising. For a lot of people, it's both.

For a long time, bragging about how you managed to watch YouTube without being subjected to ads was a particular kind of geek flexing, and an annoying one. The problem few people admit to is that avoiding advertising isn't a fix, it's a moving target. Anyone who tells you they've permanently solved it is trying to sell you something.

Turning the YouTube experience into something usable and enjoyable requires you to become your own IT department. That's definitely a downside for some. If you enjoy tinkering, it may not bother you much. I started using YouTube in December 2005, the month it debuted. That is to say I've watched the user experience decline in quality for twenty years. For most of that time I kept the ads off through whatever it took: ad blockers, standalone apps, Invidious instances, switching to whichever browser handled YouTube best that year. A few months ago, I decided there were better uses of my time than maintaining that fight. As much as I hated to do it, I subscribed to YouTube Premium and eagerly waited for a better experience. I didn't really get one.

The Problem Isn't Ads. It's Design.

Advertisements are only one of four major pain points to using the platform. Paying for Premium doesn't solve the other three.

• Ads. If you're not paying, you're watching them or fighting them somehow. Premium solves this one.
• The algorithm. YouTube decides what gets put in front of you next. Premium doesn't buy you a different recommendation engine.
• Clutter. Shorts on the home page, autoplay previews, recommendations everywhere, interface elements devoted to pulling you into something else. Individually they're minor annoyances. Together they make YouTube worse at simply showing you what you came to see.
• Impermanence. YouTube gives you lists, not a real personal library. Watch Later is useful, but it lives entirely inside someone else's service. Videos disappear. Channels disappear. Things you know you've watched become surprisingly hard to find again.

The Easy Solution

There isn't one.

Fighting a platform that doesn't answer to you is the toll for staying in control of your own experience, and nobody refunds the time you spend on it. If you've got limitless energy, fight on every front: email, search, maps, storage, video, all of it, all the time. Most of us don't have that budget. The honest move is picking which fights are worth spending it on this year and letting the rest go without guilt.

I want to decide how I discover videos. I want to decide what appears around the player. I want better ways to organize the things I intend to watch later. And when something matters enough that I don't want it disappearing because a creator, a copyright holder, or Google changes something, I want my own copy.

There isn't one app that does all of that. That's the point.

Instead of looking for a mythical "YouTube replacement," I've started treating YouTube the way I treat a lot of other technology: as infrastructure underneath a collection of smaller tools. One tool can handle viewing. Another can clean up the browser interface. Another can manage subscriptions without an algorithm deciding what deserves my attention. Another can download and archive the things I actually want to keep.

The result is less like replacing YouTube and more like building my own multi-part client for it.

The Toolbox, By Problem

Each of these gets its own real look later in the series. For now, sorted by which of the four problems above it actually solves:

Ads & sponsors

• SponsorBlock
• DeArrow
• UnTrap for YouTube

Escaping the algorithm

• Yattee
• Grayjay
• FreeTube
• PocketTube
• RSS curation via Inoreader or NetNewsWire

Cleaning up the interface

• Control Panel for YouTube
• Unhook
• Improve YouTube!
• BlockTube
• Enhancer for YouTube
• Turn Off the Lights

Keeping what matters

• yt-dlp
• Downie
• MacYTDL
• Play

If you have a favorite that isn't here, let me know.

What's Coming

The next few posts get into the actual tools: apps that get you out of the recommendation feed entirely, ways to strip the clutter out of the browser experience, and how to actually keep the videos you don't want to lose. Premium's verdict, when it comes up again, is not a blanket yes. It's worth the money if your time is worth more than $15.99 a month to you and ads were the fight costing you that time. If ads were never the fight, paying Google more won't touch the one you're actually still in.

TL;DR: Part two of the Apple Account series. Backup apps that pull your iCloud data down to storage you control, email providers that speak IMAP/CalDAV/CardDAV so Apple's own apps keep working without iCloud, ways to buy and track software outside the App Store, and a password manager that isn't Keychain. My own five picks are at the end, along with why you should be testing a restore every quarter.

Disaster Avoidance Apps

Yesterday I laid out what you lose when Apple closes your account: your identity if it's an @icloud.com address, your photos and messages, your purchases, your hardware in every practical sense, and a 2023 federal ruling that says suspicion is the only standard Apple has to meet. That post was the bad news.

This is the other half. These are the apps and services that move your data out from under a single Apple Account, what each one actually protects, and where each one falls short. There are more options here than anyone needs, and I have not run most of them. At the end I'll tell you the five I actually use and why I stopped looking after those.

iCloud Backup Apps

• BackiGo. Photos, videos, iCloud Drive and Contacts, backed up and restored to USB, NAS, or cloud storage you control. Drive versioning, scheduling, incremental backups, optional client-side encryption, and browsable restoration. I reviewed it here: BackiGo is a Dependable and Full Featured iCloud Backup Solution.
• Parachute Backup. Downloads iCloud Photos and iCloud Drive to external drives, NAS, or cloud folders. Handles originals, edits, Live Photos and Shared Albums, with scheduling and full, incremental or mirror modes. My review: Parachute Backup, Specially Designed for iCloud and Photos. Restore to a location that doesn't depend on the same Apple Account, or you've built a circle. The original dev sold the app and I moved to Backigo.
• Time Machine, with one warning that undoes the whole thing if you miss it. Turn off Optimize Mac Storage in your iCloud settings. Leave it on and macOS keeps only stubs of your iCloud files locally, so Time Machine dutifully backs up the stubs and you find out the day you need the originals.

Standards-Based Providers for Email, Calendars and Contacts

You can keep using Apple's Mail, Calendar and Contacts without tying any of the data to your Apple Account, by pointing them at a provider that supports IMAP, CardDAV and CalDAV. Reminders is the exception; Apple moved it to a private format, though Things 3 can pull to-dos out of a designated Reminders list into its own inbox.

Five providers with full IMAP/CardDAV/CalDAV support on macOS:

1. Fastmail. JMAP, IMAP, CardDAV and CalDAV, with push sync on Apple devices. Custom domains and third-party app access both come with the Individual plan; the cheaper Basic business plan has neither, so don't buy that one for this purpose. I've been using Fastmail for two years, and it also runs an MCP server if you want your mail reachable from an AI agent.
2. Mailfence. IMAP, CalDAV and CardDAV syncing straight into Apple Mail and Calendar. Belgium-based, EU jurisdiction.
3. Posteo. IMAP, POP, CalDAV and CardDAV for €1 a month, which makes it the cheapest option on this list by a wide margin. Germany-based with serious privacy protections. It does not support custom domains, so it solves the provider problem without solving the address-ownership problem.
4. Mailbox.org. CalDAV and CardDAV plus ActiveSync, with a bundled office suite. Germany-based, 30-day free trial.
5. Runbox. IMAP with CalDAV and CardDAV. The Runbox 7 web interface is still in development, so plan on using it through standard clients.

All five work natively with macOS Calendar and Contacts. Fastmail has the smoothest CalDAV experience of the ones I've touched. Posteo is the cheapest. Mailfence leans hardest on open standards.

Software Acquisition and Licensing

Whenever you have the choice, download applications directly from the developer rather than from the App Store, so your access survives your Apple Account. You give up automatic updates, Family Sharing, and in a few cases unlimited installs.

Updaters that close the first gap:

• Updatest. Menu bar updater that scans each app's own metadata to find its update source, covering Homebrew, Mac App Store, Sparkle, Electron and GitHub Releases. $12.99 one-time for 3 Macs, $24.99 for 10. Fourteen-day trial, 30-day money-back guarantee. Requires macOS 15 or later.
• Nektony App Cleaner & Uninstaller. Broad app coverage with direct update installation, and it handles uninstalls too. $24.95 a year. It's fast and doesn't miss much - but that subscription...
• Latest. Free and lightweight. Checks Mac App Store and Sparkle apps only, so expect it to catch a fraction of what the paid tools track. It's free, but it misses things the paid apps pick up.
• TrashMe 3. Cleaner and uninstaller with update detection as a side feature, plus duplicate files and startup item management. $17.99 one-time, 15-day trial.
• Homebrew with topgrade. One terminal command updates Homebrew packages, Mac App Store apps and system tools. Free, broadest coverage, and the only one here that expects you to be comfortable at a prompt. I run this every four hours with launchd.

Then track the licenses somewhere you can export from:

• License Store. Library for keys, license files, invoices and expiration dates, with drag-and-drop app import and export to CSV, JSON or its own .ls format. $7.99 one-time for the current major version, one user, up to five Macs. Requires macOS 26, which rules it out if you haven't moved to Tahoe. It syncs through iCloud, which is the dependency this whole post is about. Treat the sync as convenience between your own Macs and the manual export as the backup. Export to JSON or CSV on a schedule, put the file wherever your other backups live, and import it once to confirm the round trip works before you need it to.
• AppVault. The everything option: app snapshots with restore, unified updates across Sparkle, Homebrew, Mac App Store and Electron, a license vault with CSV import, spending tracker, deep uninstall with 14-day quarantine. $21.99 one-time, lifetime license, 3 Macs. I'm currently testing this.

An Independent Password Manager

Keep your passwords, recovery codes, server credentials and export encryption passwords outside iCloud Keychain. Then protect the new vault's recovery material somewhere else again, or you've just relocated your single point of failure.

• Bitwarden. Open source, end-to-end encrypted, cross-platform. The free tier covers unlimited passwords on unlimited devices, which is all most people need. Premium is $19.80 a year and adds encrypted file storage and YubiKey support.
• 1Password. $3.99 a month for individuals. Autofill, Watchtower breach alerts, 14-day trial, and the most polished Apple-side experience of the group. I stopped uing this when it went electron.
• KeePass. Free, open source, entirely offline, AES-256 by default, extended by community plugins. No sync and no polish; you build both yourself. The right answer if you want zero dependencies and the wrong one if you want it to just work.

Unless I've said otherwise above, the apps in this post come from research rather than daily use. The five below are the exception.

What I Actually Run

Five, and the list has been stable long enough that I've stopped shopping.

BackiGo pulls my iCloud Photos and Drive down to local storage on a schedule. It's the only one on this list that gets irreplaceable data out of Apple's custody.

Fastmail holds my mail, calendars and contacts on a domain I own, and Apple's own Mail, Calendar and Contacts talk to it over IMAP, CalDAV and CardDAV without knowing the difference. Two years in. If Apple closed my account tomorrow, my address would still work, which was the whole point.

Updatest keeps the direct-download side of my Mac current. Buying from developers instead of the App Store costs you automatic updates, and this is what I bought to pay that cost back.

License Store holds the keys and invoices for everything I didn't buy through Apple. The JSON export goes out on a schedule and lands with my other backups, per the caveat above.

Bitwarden keeps my passwords and recovery codes out of iCloud Keychain. The free tier does everything I need and I pay for Premium anyway, because a project I depend on this much should get some money from me.

Test the Restore, Not the Backup

None of this counts until you've restored from it. A backup you have never pulled a file out of is not a backup; it's a hypothesis with a progress bar. Once a quarter, pick something you'd hate to lose, a photo from ten years ago, a document with a deadline attached to it, and restore it to a machine that isn't signed in to the account you're insuring against. Open it. Confirm it's the full-resolution original and not a thumbnail, that the metadata came along, that the encryption password you set eighteen months ago still unlocks the archive. The failures I've seen were never missing backups. They were backups that ran green for two years and turned out to be empty, stale, or locked with a password nobody wrote down.

TL;DR: Mac power users vet apps carefully and then hand their entire digital life to Apple without a second thought. Apple can close your account on suspicion alone, keep your unspent balance, and never tell you why; a federal judge confirmed all of that in 2023 and threw the case out. An Apple Account is simultaneously an authentication system, cloud-storage account, software license repository, device-activation credential, communications identity, and payment account. A full lockout can therefore affect data, purchases, services, and hardware management at once.This post covers how accounts get closed, what you lose when it happens, why getting back in is so hard, and eleven things to do about it now.

All Your Eggs in One Basket, The Disaster Scenario

When the conversation turns to abandoning third party apps in favor of using Apple's default stack, I keep waiting for someone to mention the huge red flag that should instantly discourage making that move without taking some intense protective measures.

The steps I take before adding an app to my workflow are second nature. but detailed. They are probably the same steps most of you take. First I evaluate the feature set to see if it meets my needs. I look at the privacy policy, the cost of buying the app, and the cost of keeping it updated. Any app that takes a significant investment of money or time gets some research about the developer or the company behind it. Sometimes a one-person development team means the app dies when the dev loses interest. Finally I look at what third-party services the app depends on. Dropping $90 on an app Google can kill with an abitrary decsion isn't a deal breaker every time. Just most of the time.

Until last December, I did not apply the same scrutiny to the infrastructure underneath all of it, the company behind much of my digital life. I'm talking about Apple. An entire career in Mac support didn't give me a full understanding of what losing access to an Apple Account would do to someone personally and professionally.

Then Paris Buttfield-Addison, who has written more than twenty books on Apple development and helps put on the longest-running Apple developer conference Apple doesn't run itself, found his account closed for reasons Apple would not specify. After some of the biggest names in Mac journalism publicized the case, his account was restored, but Apple has refused to go on the record with any details about why it happened or, more importantly, what you and I could do to keep it from happening to us.

Suspicion is the Standard

It's more common than you'd think.

• Using a gift card, even one from a major retailer, that's been tampered with without your knowledge
• Filing a chargeback with your credit card company instead of letting Apple arbitrate a dispute over a purchase
• Making one too many refund requests
• Hijacked credentials
• Using Advanced Data Protection and losing access to your recovery credentials
• An arbitrary decision by Apple with no explanation, which happens to developer accounts as well

None of this requires Apple to be right. In 2023 a federal judge dismissed a class action over exactly this question, and the reasoning matters more than the outcome. Matthew Price ran multiple chargebacks on in-app purchases that didn't work, some of them after Apple's own support told him to take it up with his bank. Apple terminated his account, kept the $7.63 balance sitting in it, and cut him off from what he says was $24,590.05 in purchased content. Judge Haywood Gilliam dismissed the case without leave to amend: "It is simply immaterial whether Plaintiff's multiple chargebacks were actually fraudulent or manipulative because even as alleged, Apple suspected that they were." Suspicion is the standard, and you agreed to it when you accepted the terms. The same terms say you "shall not sue or recover any damages from Apple" over a decision to terminate your access.

What Actually Breaks

• Identity. If your Apple Account is an @icloud.com / @me.com / @mac.com address, closing the account kills the email address. Everything that uses it for password resets, two-factor, and billing now points at a dead mailbox.
• iCloud data. Photos, Messages history, iCloud Drive, Notes, contacts, calendars, Safari data and Passwords all become inaccessible.
• Account balance. Any unused Apple Account credit is stranded, and a court has already said Apple has no obligation to give it back.
• Purchased software and media. Apps, books, films, music. The apps are what most people will miss; you can't update them and you can't reinstall them.
• Hardware. Your iPhone, iPad, Watch, AirPods, Apple TV, HomePod and Macs are effectively bricked. Not literally dead, but unable to sync, update, or function normally. Devices sign out of iMessage and can't sign back in.
• Activation Lock. A device tied to an account you no longer control can't be cleanly released, and erasing it does not clear the lock.
• Subscriptions. Apple One, iCloud+, Apple Music, App Store subscriptions and anything else billed through Apple.
• Apple Developer ID. Apps in review, TestFlight, certificates, provisioning profiles and App Store Connect, all gone.
• Access to Apple's support channels. The Secure File Transfer system Apple uses to collect your documentation requires an Apple Account sign-in, and so do most of the escalation paths Apple suggests. A locked account can't ask for help about being locked.

Why Getting It Back Is Hard

Apple won't tell you why your account was closed, reportedly out of fear that its fraud prevention methods will be reverse engineered. Frontline support staff don't have access to the reason either, so they can't find out on your behalf and they can't escalate your issue. Making a new account on hardware already linked to suspected fraud can earn you another ban for attempting to circumvent fraud prevention. I could find no documented path to export data from a closed account.

How to Protect Yourself

• Never buy an Apple Gift Card from anyone but Apple. If you get one as a gift, that's a harder call.
• Never attempt a credit card chargeback on an Apple purchase of any kind.
• Turn on Stolen Device Protection, which means committing to 2FA, a passcode, Face or Touch ID, Significant Locations and Find My.
• Shield your device passcode in public, every single time, and make it a complex alphanumeric string instead of six digits.
• Set up a recovery contact and a recovery key.
• Some forum users keep a second Apple Account for media and purchases. I haven't tested it, but the logic holds.
• Do not use an @icloud.com address as your Apple Account.
• Own your email domain.
• Keep local, offline copies of everything.
• Run a data export on a schedule at privacy.apple.com.
• Whenever possible, download software from the developer rather than the App Store.

Tomorrow I'll post the apps and methods that let you keep using Mail, Calendar, Photos, Contacts and file storage without putting all of it inside one account Apple can close on suspicion.

From now until August 7th, these apps are on sale at Bundle Hunt starting at %75 off. I've never seen them cheaper.

Reviews of Apps I Have Personally Tested

• TextSniper - Better Than Native OCR ($7.99- On Sale For $1.99 -%75) Hit a hotkey, drag a box over anything on screen (a locked PDF, a video frame, a screenshot someone sent you), and the text lands on your clipboard; it also reads QR codes and barcodes and can speak the captured text aloud. OCR runs entirely on your Mac. (textsniper.app)
• MacPilot Tweaks Some Hard to Get To Settings in macOS ($29.95 -On Sale For $3.50 -88%) - A GUI over roughly 1,200 hidden macOS settings and defaults write tweaks: show hidden Finder files, kill the startup chime, add Dock spacers, change the screenshot format, run maintenance scripts, all without opening Terminal. koingosw.com
• Unite 5 - Site Specific Browser ($39.99 - On Sale For $5.00 -%87 off) Turns any website into an isolated, native Mac app that runs as a normal window, a menu bar dropdown, or a sidebar; you get per-app cookies, custom icons, ad blocking, userscripts and CSS, keyboard shortcut remapping, and link routing between apps. Extras like Dock badges, Google/Outlook meeting alerts, and a floating AI companion overlay are the part Safari's "Add to Dock" can't touch. (bzgapps.com/unite)

The two I haven't tried (yet) are:

Video Paw($69.99 - On Sale For $6.50 -%91) - Cisdem's all-in-one media utility: batch convert video and audio across 600+ formats, download clips from supported sites, rip DVD and Blu-ray, compress files, and record screen/webcam with live annotation. Basic editing (trim, crop, merge, watermark, subtitles) is included, so it replaces three or four single-purpose downloads.

PDF Squeezer($19.99 - On Sale For $3.98 -%80)-- Drag in a bloated PDF and it shrinks by recompressing images and stripping unused fonts and resources, with a side-by-side preview so you can see what quality you're giving up. Batch processing, saved presets, and hooks into Finder, Automator, Shortcuts, and the command line make it a good buy IMHO.

TL;DR: RAD Weather pulls forecasts from four services and shows you where they disagree instead of averaging the disagreement away. Free, with RAD Ultra at $1.99 a month, $19.99 a year, or $99.99 once, plus a MultiPass tier at $2.99 monthly or $29.99 annual. The Mac build is a real Mac app, the subscription is justified by per-forecast data costs, and there is no radar. RAD TV shipped in 7.6.7 and an Apple TV version is announced.

RAD Weather's Unique Feature

Years of obsessive cycling naturally paired with years of obsessive weather forecast following. Although none of us can do anything about the weather (except to move to a new city), I felt compelled to track temperature, wind speed and rain forecasts several times a day whenever I had a big ride scheduled. I collected weather apps and went into mourning when Dark Sky ceased to exist.

Most weather apps are someone's best guess, presented as a fact. Someone, or some algorithm, took several disagreeing weather services, picked one and discarded the rest. RAD Weather doesn't discard anything, and that's the product.

What R.A.D. Cortex Is Doing Under the Hood

The engine has a name now, R.A.D. Cortex, and its job is to pull forecasts from the National Weather Service, Open-Meteo, Environment and Climate Change Canada, and Apple WeatherKit, then compare them. Where the models converge, you get a high confidence rating. Where they split, the app shows you the spread instead of hiding it behind an average. The developer added lead-time-aware weighting in an earlier release, so regional high-resolution models carry more weight for the next few hours while ECMWF gets priority for the extended outlook. That's a reasonable thing to do, and it's the kind of decision most weather apps make silently, if they make it at all.

Five Things That Matter in the Mac Version

• It's a real Mac app. Many weather apps just port their iPad version to Apple silicon and call it a day. CARROT Weather has a standalone Mac app, but it hasn't been updated since 2023. With RAD Weather, you also get Mac widgets, a menu bar item, and iCloud sync with the iPhone and Watch versions. Requires macOS 15.0 or later.
• The multi-source view is the killer feature. Detail cards break out temperature, wind, precipitation, UV, pressure, humidity, visibility, dew point, pollen, air quality and convective risk, and the confidence deep-dive shows you which models fed the number. It's my favorite part of the app and I never stop fiddling with it.
• RAD Atlas is an interactive 3D globe with live conditions, which sounds like a toy and mostly is, but it's a fast way to check what's happening somewhere you care about without typing a city name.
• Brutality Levels adjust the tone of the written briefings across five settings, from professional to unhinged. Similar to CARROT, which is funny, RAD Weather is also funny. Since humor is subjective, I'm not making a call there. If you want a weather app that doesn't talk to you, turn it to professional and it stops.
• The privacy declaration is clean. Rozzi Labs declares no data collected beyond location, not linked to your identity, used only to fetch a forecast, with no tracking or analytics. That's about as good as a networked weather app gets.

What the Subscription Pays For

RAD Weather is free. RAD Ultra is $1.99 a month, $19.99 a year, or $99.99 once, and Ultra is what unlocks the Atlas globe, the extra saved locations, the Savage and Unhinged tone settings, full detail cards and advanced notifications. There's also RAD MultiPass at $2.99 a month or $29.99 a year, which extends across the other Rozzi Labs apps and the radweather.cloud web service.

No one likes an unjustified subscription. I've done my best recently to avoid writing about subscription apps altogether. Weather prediction apps are the exception. Every forecast this app pulls costs the developer money, and he's pulling from four services instead of one; widget and Watch complication refreshes multiply that cost across every user, every day, forever. A one-time purchase doesn't fund a bill that arrives monthly for the life of the app. The developer of CARROT Weather has been making the same argument for years, and he's right.

The whole high-end category runs this way. CARROT Weather is free to download with Premium at $4.99 a month or $19.99 a year and Premium Ultra at $9.99 a month or $39.99 a year. Mercury Weather is free with a subscription at $2.99 a month or $14.99 a year. Hello Weather limits you to a single forecaster and no widgets until you subscribe. Against all that, RAD Weather is one of only two apps here that will sell you a permanent copy. RAD Ultra Lifetime is $99.99, which works out to five years of the annual subscription; Mercury's lifetime is $59.99, or four years of its annual. Neither is a bargain on day one. CARROT has no lifetime tier at any price, which is the part I mind.

Current Shortcomings

RAD Weather doesn't currently offer radar maps, so if that's how you make decisions during rough times, you'll need something else. There are other weather apps with a long and proven track record. Its App Store rating is high, but the number of ratings behind it is still small enough that I wouldn't lean on it.

Other Weather Apps

The alternatives, briefly. CARROT Weather, to which I have subscribed for years, is the incumbent in personality weather and has the better radar and map layer story; note that the standalone Mac app is $14.99 and hasn't been updated since May 2023, so on the Mac you want the iPhone and iPad version instead. Mercury Weather, another app I've used in the past, is the choice if you want calm and legible rather than loud. Apple Weather is free, built in, and fine for the basics. DatWeatherDoe is free, open source under Apache 2.0, installs with brew install --cask datweatherdoe, and puts conditions in your menu bar; you supply your own WeatherAPI key.

Unless otherwise noted, the alternate apps mentioned above are based on research and not individual testing.

Is It for You?

Yes, if you want accuracy and detail from a weather app and you're willing to pay for it. The multiplatform coverage helps too, especially with the recently released full screen RAD TV mode for the Mac and an Apple TV app on the way.

No, if you want radar, or your needs are minimal. For design nerds, the faux terminal presentation may be off-putting. Not being a design nerd, I'm fine with it.

TL;DR: Orbit runs multiple Google accounts in their own isolated WebKit sessions inside one native Mac window, for $89 one time instead of the $50 to $200 a year the alternatives want. I use it even though I am personally de-Googled because I have to manage the affairs for my elderly dad. Orbit will work as long as Google keeps letting Mac apps sign in, but passkey-only and Advanced Protection accounts already can't.

The Google Accounts I Didn't Ask For

My opinion of big tech companies has hardened over the years. Their business models turned into anti-privacy juggernauts, so I started pulling away from them. In January 2025, after using Gmail for twenty years, I downloaded my entire archive, deleted every message off their servers and moved to Fastmail. Drive went to Koofr. Search went to Kagi. Gemini got replaced by ChatGPT. I left the empty account open since it linked me to a lot of legacy logins and contacts.

Then, nine months later, I became responsible for managing the affairs of my elderly father, something that commonly happens to people in my age group. Dad's life ran through multiple Gmail accounts, personal and professional: his doctors, his investments and the guy who cuts his grass all reached him through Google, the company I had worked so hard to get away from. I couldn't ask an 80-year-old man to move house on the internet. I had to log back in.

That's the part nobody warns you about. You can de-Google yourself in a weekend if you're stubborn. You can't de-Google somebody else, and the account that drags you back in was never yours to begin with.

Browsers do this badly on purpose. Google's account switcher runs every account you sign into through a single browser session, so a security re-check on one can sign you out of all of them at once, and the account you're currently "in" is a state you have to remember rather than see. Everybody who lives this way eventually has the moment where they send, or nearly send, a message from the wrong account. Sometimes that's an embarrassment. Sometimes it's worse.

The fix is an app, and the one I recommend is Orbit from Andrew Kwak at Dearnode. It's a one-time purchase of $89. That's a steep number to look at once, and cheaper than every competitor that charges $50 a year and up.

Each account gets its own sealed WebKit session, with its own cookies and its own sign-in, so signing into one never signs you out of another. ⌘1 through ⌘9 switch between them, all preloaded, with unread badges per account. Inside each one is the real Gmail, not a rebuild through the API, so your labels, filters and keyboard shortcuts are the ones you already have. Calendar, Drive and Meet open in the right account too. I have three accounts in mine.

Why I picked Orbit

Orbit is designed around privacy. It doesn't route your mail through a server it owns. There is no Orbit account to maintain. Analytics are turned off by default. It doesn't phone home, and if Dearnode vanished tomorrow, Orbit would keep working until Google changes something on their end.

Because Dearnode has no servers to maintain, the one-time price is sustainable. Kiwi, the app I used for years with Gmail, committed what I consider an unpardonable sin earlier this year when it stopped honoring lifetime licenses it had already sold and moved every customer to $60 a year. It's not the only casualty in this category: Sidekick was absorbed by Perplexity and shut down in 2025, and Mailplane stopped selling licenses in 2021.

Orbit is written in Swift and runs on WebKit. It weighs 9.9 MB on my system, a far cry from the Electron build behind Shift.

Why it might not work for you

To his credit, Orbit's developer publishes the warnings himself rather than waiting for a reviewer to find them:

• Sign-in is per-Mac. Three machines means three sign-ins, and there's no cross-device sync.
• Accounts using passkey-only sign-in or Google's Advanced Protection Program can't sign in at all, due to a WebKit limitation.
• It's Apple silicon and macOS 14 or later. No Intel.
• It's not on the Mac App Store, because the sandbox would break the per-account isolation the whole app exists for.

And one risk that isn't Kwak's fault and isn't in his power to fix. Orbit works because Google lets a Mac app sign in and render Gmail. Google can withdraw that. It has before: Mailplane stopped selling licenses in 2021 when Google started blocking embedded browsers at the sign-in page, and Mailplane was the same idea as Orbit, Gmail's web interface in a Mac shell. The accounts Orbit can't sign in today, the passkey-only and Advanced Protection ones, are that same door already partly closed.

Kwak has built the parts he controls to fail quietly. If Google reshuffles Gmail's page, an unread badge goes stale instead of your mail breaking, because the mail was never his code. That's the right way to build this. It just doesn't help with the failure that matters, which is Google deciding one morning that apps like this don't get in anymore.

The Others

Every alternative here costs you something. Some want a subscription, some run on a browser engine you didn't ask for, and the free ones make you give up the switching and the badges.

• Mimestream is well liked, and it's also $50 a year.
• Shift is $200 a year and it's Electron. There's a free tier some people will find suitable.
• Kiwi for Gmail was my daily driver for years and it worked. Their decision to stop honoring lifetime licenses blunts any regard I once had for them.
• Ferdium is free and open source. Community-built, Electron, and it will hold multiple instances of the same service. I've run it myself. Free is free.
• Safari profiles are already on your Mac, and I've used them for this. Separate cookies and separate sign-ins per profile, no purchase, no keyboard switching, no unread badges. If you have two accounts, try this before you spend anything.

I haven't personally tested Mimestream or Shift and this information comes from their websites.

Who should buy this

Writing about a Google adjacent app doesn't mean I've reconsidered anything. Fastmail, Koofr and Kagi are still where I manage my own life. But I couldn't de-Google on my father's behalf. Pretending otherwise would have cost him his pharmacy, his insurance and his bank. His accounts aren't a preference, they're an obligation, and the software worth paying for is the software that makes an obligation easiest to manage.

If you're carrying three or more Google accounts you didn't choose, you switch between them all day, and you've had the wrong-sender scare, $89 once is a fair price for never having that thought again. There's a 14-day trial that doesn't ask for a card and a 30-day refund window, so trying it costs you an afternoon.

If you have two accounts, Safari profiles are free. If you want a real native mail client and a merged inbox, Mimestream is the app and the subscription is the tax. And if you run Advanced Protection, Orbit can't sign you in at all, which puts it out of reach for exactly the people its architecture was built to appeal to.

TL;DR: Blankie is a free, open-source ambient sound mixer for Mac, iPhone, iPad and CarPlay; no ads, IAPs, or subscriptions. 24 mixable sounds, saved presets, custom audio import, menu bar control. Stacked against Noizio, Dark Noise, myNoise, and Endel, all of which charge something for depth or convenience Blankie gives away for free.

A breath of fresh air, right in your ear

I'm not usually one to complain about app pricing, but I make an exception when it feels like someone is misrepresenting the complexity of something simple to justify a monetization strategy. Ambient sound apps, at their core, are well-organized loop players, and nothing about them justifies subscriptions, tiered unlocks, and $50 lifetime passes. You get rain, waves, white noise and a coffee shop hum with variations. That's the whole package.

Enter Blankie, a free and open-source ambient sound mixer from developer Cody Bromley that gives you everything you need without insulting your intelligence or your wallet. It also respects your privacy by not collecting any data. It's inspired by Blanket, a Linux app in the same category. Blankie avoids ads, IAPs, subscription tiers and paywalls. It's just free, forever. Better yet, it works on your Mac, your phone, your iPad and your car.

How it works

With Blankie, it's easy to construct custom loops and recall them at will. You get 24 sound elements to experiment with, including several added in the most recent updates: rain, storms, wind, ocean waves, a running stream, birds, forest, crickets, a train, boat, airplane, city hum, coffee shop, fireplace, fan, laundry room, plus a few music-adjacent layers (piano, lo-fi beats, guitar, ambient synth) and the full noise family (white, pink, green, brown). App Store link

The features that matter

• Per-sound volume control: every layer has its own slider on top of a master volume, so you're not stuck with someone else's idea of "coffee shop" balance.
• Saved presets: build a mix once for deep work, another for sleep, and switch between them instead of re-tuning sliders every time.
• Bring your own audio: you can import your own sounds or voice notes, and Blankie loudness-matches them automatically so nothing jumps out of the mix. I experimented with the sound of my own box fan and it worked!
• Sleep timer with fade-out: it winds down and stops instead of just cutting off, which matters more than it sounds like it should at 11pm.
• Menu bar control: as of version 2.0 there's a menu bar popover for quick mix and timer changes, plus an option to hide the Dock icon entirely, both added directly in response to user feedback on the App Store.

Do you need an app for this?

One of the under-publicized features available in macOS Accessibility settings is a control for background sounds. You can get a flat layer of white noise without installing anything. If that does the trick to drown out your office mate's Zoom calls, then you're golden. If you want actual combinations you can control, layering rain with a fireplace, mixing to your own balance, saving distinct presets, and importing your own recordings, Apple's built-in version doesn't do any of that.

The apps I complained about

I've tried Noizio and Endel. They work, but they cost more than they're worth.

• Noizio ($9.99 one-time, Mac App Store, also on Setapp) has 40 sounds behind the paid tier versus 5 free, and I covered it here previously; it's the closest direct comparison and the app several Blankie reviewers say they're switching from.
• Dark Noise now runs $2.99/month or $19.99/year for full access after moving off its original one-time-purchase model in 2023, with a free tier limited to eight sounds; there's still a $49.99 lifetime option for people who want to opt out of the subscription entirely.
• myNoise is free to download with a $19.99 in-app purchase ("Full Access") that unlocks its full 300+-soundscape library; it's a much deeper catalog aimed partly at tinnitus masking and therapeutic use, not just background focus noise.
• Endel If you want the adaptive end of this category, runs $19.99/month or roughly $89.99/year (with a ~$249 lifetime option), and generates sound algorithmically rather than letting you hand-build a mix; different product, This may be the most over-priced app I've even seen.

Unless otherwise noted, the alternate apps mentioned above are based on research and not individual testing.

Bottom Line

Use Blankie if you want a free, privacy-respecting sound mixer that doesn't hold features hostage behind a subscription, and you're fine with a smaller sound library (24) than the subscription apps offer in exchange for owning the whole thing outright. If you own something else already or you just really need hundreds of soundscapes and don't mind paying, go with myNoise.

TL;DR: RetroMac is a free menu bar app that overlays CRT/VHS shaders and full classic-OS themes (System 6, Mac OS 9, Aqua, Snow Leopard, BeOS, NeXTSTEP, Windows 98/XP) on top of macOS without touching your system. The one time option to spend €8.88 for extra presets and the webcam shader seems to be more of a way to support development (Do it!) rather than something you pay extra for to gain functionality.

Time Traveling

Mac users tend to be nostalgic about the hardware and software they used in their earliest exposure to tech. That doesn't mean anyone wants to try to get real work done on a late-90s PowerPC Mac clone, or go back to 14-inch monitors. People just enjoy being reminded how far we've come, and pretend there was once a time when everything "just worked." (It didn't. I was there.)

German developer Maik Klotz created a free app, RetroMac, that turns your current Mac into a version of the Wayback Machine. It doesn't touch your system. It paints. A Metal shader sits on top of whatever's already rendering: CRT curvature, scanlines, VHS tracking noise. It can also swap your dock, wallpaper, boot screen, and cursor set for a specific era's look: Windows 98, Windows XP, System 6, Mac OS 9, Mac OS X Aqua, Snow Leopard, BeOS, NeXTSTEP. If all that lickable tech scares you, you go back to boring just by quitting RetroMac.

How Much Time Travel Do You Want?

• Get a little or a lot. RetroMac's modular design combines your choice of elements to build a look you're comfortable with. There are toggles for shader, theme, dock, Retro TV, and live wallpaper. Play around with everything but the one window you want your boss to see if he wanders by. That one you can keep sharp.
• Pick a window, or a display. The shader works on a single window, but it's more fun to turn your secondary display into a period piece. Fire up an old game on YouTube and let it run while your co-workers gather round.
• Themes go deep. You get matching cursors, icon sets, boot splashes, and actual .saver modules (Flying Toasters, Flurry, 3D Pipes) in every shipped theme. RetroMac is more than a wallpaper shuffle with a dock overlay.
• Retro TV is its own feature. Play a variety of video streams in a CRT-framed window, or use it in your next Zoom meeting (or Teams, or Meet) if your clients and co-workers have a sense of humor.
• It's easy to go back to normal. Health Check plus one-click restore for wallpaper, dock, and menu bar. Free to use, with a one-time €8.88 Pro upgrade for extra shader presets, custom presets, and the webcam shader. No subscription, no account, no telemetry.

Yeah, But Why?

Sometimes an app is just fun, and this falls into that category, but there are a few semi-practical uses too:

• Screen recording
• Retro gaming
• Showcase setups
• Music videos

Do You Really Need an App for This?

Depends what you're actually nostalgic for.

Glaze ($9.99 one-time) is the closest direct competitor: a live GPU-shader overlay for your whole Mac with 50+ looks, including CRT, VHS, Game Boy, comic-book, and oil-painting filters. It skips the classic-OS theme replication entirely and focuses on the shader layer, so if you just want the tube-TV look on a normal desktop without the Windows 98 cosplay, it's narrower and cheaper.

retroStrip is the odd one out: not a shader app at all, but a modern recreation of the classic Mac OS Control Strip, the little floating bar of one-click controls from System 7.1 onward. The base app is free (retroStrip LE); additional icon theme packs are $2 each or $5 for all three. If what you actually miss is the Control Strip specifically, this is a tighter, single-purpose tool than RetroMac's dock feature.

RetroVisor is free and open source, a ScreenCaptureKit-and-Metal shader overlay clearly modeled on Windows' ShaderGlass. It runs in a floating window rather than full screen and has none of RetroMac's theme, dock, or Retro TV features. Good pick if all you want is the CRT glass effect and you don't want to pay anything.

Two flags on that. First, these three comparisons are based on research, not testing; I haven't installed any of them myself. Second, that actually cuts in RetroMac's favor: you'd have to install and configure all three to come close to what one app does by itself.

Obligatory War Story

Apple released its last CRT-equipped computer in 2003 and discontinued it three years later.. Targeted at the education market, the eMac came in one color: white. It lacked the iMac's convenient carrying handle and weighed in at over 50 pounds, looking for all the world like the front end of the space shuttle viewed from behind. Most of them wouldn't run any version of OS X beyond Tiger. My employer, a rural school district in North Carolina, bought them by the thousands. I was the "Mac guy," so I spent months of my life unboxing eMacs for computer labs and placing them in every K-5 classroom in the district. It gave me PTSD, and to this day I can't look at a 17-inch CRT (or Tiger) without flinching.

TL;DR

Peek's been the default Quick Look extension since 2021, but its App Store listing hasn't visibly updated since April 2022 and it was never built for structured data. Looq (SQLite, diffs, package signing, live reload) and Unfold (RAR/7z, ebooks, comics) both launched in 2026 to cover ground Peek doesn't touch, at the same $10 price. Which one you want depends entirely on whether your Quick Look problem is text or data.

Quick Look History

Quick Look extensions have evolved over time. Once the category seemed to be made up of legacy junk: kernel-adjacent hacks that broke every time Apple shipped a point release, the kind of thing you install once, forget about, and eventually blame for a random Finder freeze. That reputation was earned. For years the ecosystem really was a pile of abandoned generators held together by community goodwill.

Then, starting with Peek in 2021, the category was reborn on native QLPreviewingController extensions, sandboxed, App Store-distributed, and stable across OS upgrades in a way the old plugin era never was. Press Space on a file Quick Look doesn't understand, and there's now a real decision to make about which extension handles it. Aside from Peek, two apps released in 2026 are also competing for your attention: Looq and Unfold.

Quick Look extensions built on native APIs are meaningfully more stable across OS upgrades than the legacy plugin era, and the ability to skip the old "extract, view, delete" archive-clutter cycle is worth the price of admission on its own. On the development side, the appeal is inspecting code from Finder mid-workflow without breaking a terminal session. One aggravation is the sandboxing limit that prevents dragging files directly out of a Quick Look overlay onto the desktop. Part of the appeal for me is my preference for single-purpose extensions over bundling Quick Look enhancements into a bigger, always-running utility. If your needs are light (you just want code to have color), take a look at Syntax Highlight, a free, open source alternative featuring code highlighting only, built on the same native extension architecture as the paid options, no rendering flourishes.

Peek - Good But Dated

Peek showed up to solve a specific, well-remembered grievance: Apple killed QLEnableTextSelection back in Sierra, and for six years there was no clean way to select or copy text out of a Quick Look preview. Peek fixed that, added Markdown rendering, syntax highlighting across roughly 200 languages, scroll-position memory, and 70-plus themes, and became the default recommendation for a legitimate reason: it worked, it covered 530-plus file extensions, and it did it without the sketchy Input Monitoring access early competitors needed.

I won't call it abandonware... but is it? Peek's App Store listing shows version 2.6.4 as its most recent entry, dated April 2022, and the copyright footer on the developer's own site still reads "© 2021-2022." That doesn't mean it's broken today, but it's worth knowing before considering it the de facto favorite just because it's familiar.

More to the point for this comparison: Peek was built to make Quick Look better at showing you text. It was never built to show you structured data. There's no SQLite browsing, no diff/patch rendering, and no archive or package-metadata inspection anywhere in its feature set. That's exactly the gap Looq and Unfold showed up to fill.

Peek vs. Looq vs. Unfold

What all three have in common:

• Native, sandboxed Quick Look extensions, no kernel extensions or legacy plugin architecture.
• Markdown rendering with a generated table of contents.
• Syntax-highlighted source code preview.
• One-time purchase pricing, no subscription (Peek and Looq $7.99–$10 depending on storefront; Unfold $10).
• Zero data collection, per each app's own App Store privacy disclosure.

What's unique to Peek:

• The deepest raw file-type coverage of the three: 530-plus extensions, including obscure config and legacy source formats the other two don't bother with.
• Search, jump-to-line, and jump-to-page inside the preview itself: real keyboard navigation, not just rendering.
• 70-plus syntax themes plus a custom CSS stylesheet option.
• The only one of the three that predates the current "developer-file QuickLook" wave by four years, with the review history to show it.

What's unique to Looq:

• SQLite database browsing with pagination, column types, and sortable tables — nothing else here touches this.
• Diff/patch rendering with color-coded, dual line numbers.
• Live-reloading previews: edit and save a Markdown or Mermaid file while Quick Look is open, and the preview updates without you pressing Space again.
• Metadata inspection for .app, .ipa, .pkg, .dmg, .iso, and provisioning profiles: code signing, entitlements, and notarization status, right from the preview.
• A built-in diagnostics tool that detects and repairs conflicting Quick Look extensions.
• A menu-bar recent-files view and a CLI companion tool.

What's unique to Unfold:

• Broader archive format support: RAR and 7z on top of ZIP/TAR/GZ/BZ2, which Looq and Peek don't cover.
• Ebook and comic preview: EPUB, FB2, CBR, CBZ.
• Three distinct folder-preview layouts (Native, Grid, List).
• The lowest macOS floor of the three going the other direction: it actually requires the newest OS, 15.6 (Sequoia) or later, versus Looq's 15.0 and Peek's 10.15.

Which one is right for you?

Peek. Why you'd use it: the deepest file-type coverage of the three, real in-preview navigation (search, jump-to-line), and four years of being the thing everyone already recommends. Counterpoint: it hasn't visibly shipped an update since 2022, and it was never built to handle structured data — no SQLite, no diffs, no archive or package inspection. If your files are mostly text and code, it's still fine. If they're not, it can't help you.

Looq. Why you'd use it: you're a developer, sysadmin, or technical writer who wants Quick Look to actually understand what it's showing you — SQLite schemas without opening DB Browser, diffs without a git client, signed .pkg contents without installing first. Counterpoint: if you only need Markdown or only need code color, Looq is more app than you need, and QLMarkdown or Syntax Highlight get you there for free.

Unfold. Why you'd use it: you deal in RAR/7z archives, or you want ebook and comic previews, neither of which Looq or Peek offer, at the same $10 as Looq. Counterpoint: no SQLite, no diff viewer, no package-signing inspection. If your work involves databases or shipping installers, Unfold is the one of the three that can't help.

Special Purpose Quick Look Plugins

• Suspicious Package is free (mothersruin.com). Does one thing, installer package inspection, better than Looq's broader metadata preview does it, because it's all the app is for.
• QLMarkdown is free and open source (github.com/sbarex/QLMarkdown). Markdown and LaTeX only, nothing else. The move if Markdown rendering is the only gap in your Quick Look setup. Its Homebrew cask is deprecated as of September 2026; manual installs from GitHub releases still work.
• Syntax Highlight is free and open source (github.com/sbarex/SourceCodeSyntaxHighlight). Code highlighting only, built on the same native extension architecture as the paid options, no rendering flourishes.
• BetterZip is $35 (macitbetter.com). Not a Quick Look extension first; it's a full archive manager that happens to ship one. If you're already paying for BetterZip to handle RAR/7z/encrypted archives, its Quick Look generator already does the archive-preview job Unfold and Looq are also doing.