Inside Bartender 6: Trust, Control, and the Future of the macOS Menu Bar

Bartender has long been the gold standard for macOS customization. For years, it’s helped power users keep control of an increasingly crowded menu bar—well beyond what macOS offers out of the box.

With Bartender now part of Applause and macOS Tahoe forcing a ground-up rebuild, Bartender 6 marks one of the most significant moments in the app’s history. Following our Bartender 6 review, we spoke with Stephen Shan, Senior Product Manager at Applause Group, Inc., about what changed, what stayed the same, and how the team is thinking about trust, performance, and the future of menu bar customization on macOS.

TheSweetBits: Bartender has been part of Applause for nearly two years now. Looking back, what changes from that transition have actually mattered most—and what did you deliberately preserve so long-time users would still feel this is “their” Bartender?

Stephen Shan: “From the beginning, our goal with Bartender was to preserve everything that people already loved about the app. With all of the apps we acquire at Applause, we try to make the transition as seamless as possible for existing users, and Bartender was no exception. We were very deliberate about maintaining the familiar experience so long-time users would still feel like this was their Bartender.

At the same time, one thing that has meaningfully changed is our commitment to continuing to invest in the product. We’re focused on adding more over time and that ongoing improvement is what we believe really matters.”

The latest Bartender 6 is described as being “redesigned from the ground up” for macOS Tahoe. What specific changes in Tahoe’s menu bar architecture or APIs made a full rebuild necessary rather than iterating on Bartender 5?

“Tahoe had a fundamental shift in how menu bar items are managed under-the-hood. In previous macOS versions, we used to be able to ask the Mac “Hey, what’s in the bar?” and get a list of items, where they were, and who they belonged to – and it did this quickly, too.

To get around this limitation, we had to rebuild how Bartender works out what is in your bar, where it is, and who owns it, using a brand new system that doesn’t share a single line of code with the previous iterations.

Tahoe also brought a shift in how we go about moving menu bar items, and more importantly, the performance of that. This resulted in the detection system & the layout system requiring a full rebuild, so we re-built everything. From the layout algorithms through to the UI, nothing was left untouched.”

Presets, Triggers, Groups, and Widgets are powerful new concepts in Bartender 6. From your data or user feedback, which features are people actually relying on most in real workflows—and which one has been the hardest to make both powerful and reliable?

“Widgets are a powerful tool to allow you to make your own menu bar items, and with that, comes a heap of challenges. You can have scripts running, live updating data, run almost anything on click, add custom menus, graphs, and more. This means there’s a lot of different possibilities we need to support, but we think it’s worth it. We’ve already had users share menu bar items they’ve created that replace full apps, and it hasn’t been around for that long, so we can’t wait to see what people come up with.

We don’t collect usage data at all, so what we know comes from user feedback and support conversations. Based on that, Triggers are probably the feature people rely on the most in real-world workflows. They unlock a lot of automation and flexibility, which power users especially seem to love. That said, all of these features (Presets, Triggers, Groups, and Widgets) have been challenging in their own ways, especially making sure they work as expected on Tahoe.”

Bartender asks for Screen Recording permissions, which makes some users nervous. Can you walk us through exactly what Bartender does under each permission—and which features stop working if a user tries to run the app as locked-down as possible?

“Bartender needs access to the Screen Recording permissions to get the items in your bar, to know where they are, and to show images of them in the layout screens, bartender bar, and to power triggers. These APIs are locked behind the screen recording permission, so we have to ask for those.

The images are stored in-memory, and never leave your device – we couldn’t see them if we wanted to, and we don’t.

Once you’ve set up your bar for the first time, the permission can be revoked, and we’ll just disable the features that don’t work without it. You can still use Bartender to keep your bar clean and show/hide items when you want to, but we can’t dynamically rearrange them, or let you use Bartender Bar & Triggers.

We’re internally testing a version of Bartender that returns the ability to rearrange without this permission, that we hope to share soon.”

Some early macOS Tahoe users reported lag and menu bar glitches on macOS Tahoe. What was the underlying technical conflict, and what improvements have you made since those early releases?

“When Tahoe first launched, there were two major issues in the way of Bartender working as expected. First up, we had the system-wide changes to how the menu bar works, which we needed to re-engineer for. Second, macOS had a bug causing a huge CPU spike when an item was moved in the bar (even if we weren’t the ones to move it) that shipped in the final versions of Tahoe.

We had a public beta period where we worked through our side of this one, and then we pushed hard to find workarounds for the system issue too. Some later builds of Tahoe improved this, but we found a way to handle this ourselves too. We’ve continued to refine this approach, and now Bartender can run even better on Tahoe than it did on Sequoia.”

Apple has slowly added more menu bar management through features like Control Center. Do you view Apple’s moves as a threat to Bartender, or do you believe there will always be a “power-user gap” that Apple is unwilling to fill?

“We generally view competition as a good thing – it pushes innovation forward and leads to better products and experiences for everyone. While most people associate Bartender primarily with menu bar management, the app does far more than that. Features like Presets, Triggers, Widgets, and Groups go well beyond what Apple currently offers, which is just entirely removing things from the bar.

We believe there will always be a segment of users who want deeper control and customization, and that’s one area where Bartender continues to shine. For users who want to show/hide temporarily, there’s no better solution.”

We’ve seen many macOS utilities integrating ‘AI’ to predict user behavior. Is there a future for Bartender where the app ‘learns’ which icons I need based on my current workflow or location, or do you intend to keep the app strictly manual and user-controlled?

“Bartender already has options for showing different items / presets based on Triggers, for example, when you have Xcode open, changing the items in your bar to be all tech focused. This requires setup at the moment, but Bartender being able to learn what you use and when wouldn’t be out of the question.

If we went down this route, we’d use local intelligence, like Foundation Models, so user’s privacy wouldn’t have to be affected – and it would be something you have to turn on, not something we just do without asking.”

TheSweetBits Final Words

Bartender 6 isn’t just an update—it’s a response to how deeply macOS itself has changed. As Apple continues to simplify menu bar management, Bartender is leaning into power, automation, and user-defined control.

Whether through Triggers, Widgets, or the potential for local intelligence, Bartender‘s direction remains clear: give advanced users the tools to shape their own workflows—while keeping that control firmly in their hands.

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