Mac apps worth installing first, sorted by the problem each one solves

Most lists of the best Mac apps are sorted by the author's affection. That is a fine way to read on a Sunday and a poor way to set up a machine, because affection does not tell you which of thirty apps you actually need, or which two will still be running in a year.

Sorting by problem works better. Name the thing that is slow or annoying, install the narrowest tool that fixes it, and stop. What follows is organised that way. Every price and requirement below was read from the vendor's own page, the Mac App Store or Homebrew cask metadata on September 23, 2026, and all of it is subject to change.

The filter that keeps the list short

Three questions decide whether an app deserves a permanent seat on a Mac.

Does it replace a repeated action, or an occasional one. Something that saves four seconds twenty times a day is worth a resident process. Something that saves four minutes twice a year is worth remembering the name of and installing when needed.

Second, what does it need permission to do. Anything that watches the keyboard, reads the screen, rearranges other apps' windows or redraws the menu bar needs Accessibility, and often Screen Recording. Those requests are appropriate for the work, and they are still worth granting one at a time rather than in a batch during a setup afternoon.

Third, what happens when it goes away. A small developer can stop. A domain can lapse. The practical protection is not avoiding small developers, who make most of the good Mac software, but preferring apps that keep working offline, store their settings in a readable place, and have an open alternative in the same category.

That last point has a recent illustration. NotchNook, for a while the best known app for the MacBook notch, had its Homebrew cask disabled on September 19, 2026 with the reason recorded as "unreachable", and its developer's domain no longer resolves. The category still has working options. The lesson is about keeping a licence key somewhere safe, not about avoiding paid software.

Moving windows and finding things

These two fix the highest frequency actions on any Mac, which is why they belong at the top of a fresh install rather than halfway down a list.

Rectangle moves and resizes windows with keyboard shortcuts and snap areas. It is free and open source, and its page states support for macOS 10.15 or later on Intel as well as Apple silicon. Half left, half right, maximise. Three shortcuts cover most of a working day. There is a paid Rectangle Pro with more layouts, offered free for ten days, with one licence active on three devices at a time and a requirement of macOS 13.5 or later. Start with the free one, and let the limits of it make the case for the paid one if they ever do.

Raycast replaces the launcher with something that also runs commands, searches files, manages clipboard history and extends through a library of extensions. The free plan is genuinely usable. Raycast Pro is listed at $10 per month, or $96 per year for an individual, and adds AI features, cloud sync and custom themes. The decision here is unusual for this list: the free version is enough for most people indefinitely, so treat Pro as a subscription to the AI features rather than as unlocking the app.

The reason to install these first is that everything else on the list is occasional. These two are not. A window mover and a launcher are touched dozens of times an hour without being thought about, which is also why they are the two most likely to be kept. An app that is only reached for deliberately has to justify itself every time, and most of them eventually fail to.

There is a related habit worth adopting on a new machine. Give each new app a week on its own before adding the next one, rather than installing eight in an afternoon. Two things come out of that. The shortcuts actually get learned, because there is nothing competing for the same fingers. And when something misbehaves, whether that is a permission prompt appearing repeatedly or a key combination that stops working in one app, the cause is obvious rather than one of eight possibilities.

Capturing and reusing what is on screen

CleanShot X replaces the built-in screenshot tools with a workflow: scrolling capture, annotation, hiding desktop icons before a shot, short screen recordings, and a link to share the result. CleanShot Basic is $35, described on the pricing page as "Pay once, use forever", including the Mac app, one year of updates and 1 GB of cloud storage, with optional renewal at $19 per year after that. CleanShot Pro is $10 per user per month billed annually and adds unlimited storage with a custom domain and branding.

The honest comparison is against Command-Shift-5, which is free and already installed. For someone who sends two screenshots a week, macOS is enough. For anyone who documents, reports bugs or teaches, the scrolling capture and the annotation tools are the part that earns the price.

Maccy keeps clipboard history, and does only that. It is open source under the MIT license, free from its own site, $9.99 on the Mac App Store, and requires macOS Sonoma 14 or higher. The App Store price buys convenience and supports the developer. The functionality is the same either way.

A clipboard manager is the app people are most surprised by, because the problem it solves is invisible until it is gone. Copying two things in a row stops being a mistake that costs a trip back to the original window.

Looking after the hardware

AlDente holds the battery at a set percentage while the Mac stays plugged in, which is the normal state for a laptop that lives on a desk. There is a free tier that includes the charge limiter and discharge. AlDente Pro is listed at 11,49 € for a one year licence or 23,99 € for a lifetime licence, and is also included in the Setapp subscription at $9.99 per month alongside more than 240 other apps. Its page states a requirement of macOS 12 or later, and that one purchase produces one licence key usable on up to three macOS user accounts.

One thing to check before buying anything in this category. macOS has shipped Optimized Battery Charging for years, and the developer of AlDente has written about Apple expanding it with a built-in manual charge limiter. Anyone who only wants to set a number and forget about it should look at what the system already offers before paying. The paid tier is aimed at people who want scheduled behaviour, discharge in clamshell mode and deterministic control.

Keeping files from piling up

Hazel watches folders and acts on what arrives: file it, rename it, tag it, archive it, throw it away after thirty days. Its store lists Hazel 6 at $42, a household licence for up to five members at $65, and an upgrade from a previous version at $20, with a free trial available.

This one earns its place on a specific kind of Mac. If the Downloads folder has four thousand items in it and the Desktop has a hundred, a set of rules written once will do more for the machine than any other app on this list. If downloads are already filed as they arrive, Hazel is an elegant answer to a question nobody asked.

The menu bar, which fills up because of everything above

Here is the part most lists leave out. Install six good Mac apps and five of them will want a permanent icon in the menu bar. Add the ones macOS puts there itself, and the right hand side is full.

On a MacBook this is not merely untidy. The camera housing splits the bar into two halves, and extras fill the right half from the clock leftwards. When they run out of width they are not drawn at all. No wrapping, no scrolling, no overflow menu. The icon is simply gone, and the app it belonged to gives no sign that anything happened.

Apple's own remedy is per application. The support document How to adjust an app's settings to appear below the camera area on your MacBook Air or MacBook Pro describes quitting the app, selecting it in the Applications folder, choosing File then Get Info, and ticking "Scale to fit below built-in camera". That moves the whole app below the housing, and costs vertical space whenever it is in front.

The broader fix is a menu bar manager, which sorts items into what stays visible, what waits behind a divider, and what never appears unless asked for.

App	Price	Requires
Ice	Free, GPL-3.0	macOS 14 or later
Hidden Bar	Free, open source	macOS 13 or later
Barbee	Free to download, paid in-app purchase	macOS 11.0 or later
Bartender	Paid, fourteen day free trial	macOS 14 or later

They differ more than the category name suggests. Some redraw a copy of a hidden icon, which loses the live badge or battery percentage the original was showing. Some can open a hidden item's menu without expanding the whole bar. Some bring an item back on a condition, such as the battery falling below a level. The comparison of menu bar tools sets those differences out one at a time.

The costs that do not show on a price tag

Adding it up honestly changes which apps make the cut.

Each resident app is a login item, a set of permissions, a process that has to survive the next macOS release, and a developer who has to still be there. macOS 27 Golden Gate shipped on September 14, 2026 and dropped Intel Macs entirely, which is a useful moment to look at when each installed app last shipped a release.

Subscriptions deserve a separate line. Two at $10 a month is $240 a year, which is more than every one-time purchase on this list combined. That is not an argument against subscriptions, which fund continuous work, but it is an argument for counting them together once a year rather than one at a time.

Trials are worth using properly, which means using the app on real work rather than exploring its settings. At the end, the question is not whether the app was pleasant. It is whether its absence would be noticed within a day. Two or three apps will pass that test and the rest will not, and a Mac running four well chosen utilities is faster and calmer than one running twelve.

Before paying for anything resident, three questions predict how well the purchase ages. Does it keep working when the vendor's servers do not. Are its settings stored on the machine in a readable form. What does a one-time price cover when the next major version ships. A pricing page that answers all three without being asked has told you something about the people behind it.

What to change first

Install the two highest frequency tools, a window mover and a launcher, and use them for a week before adding anything else. Then look at the right hand side of the menu bar, because by that point it will have filled up, and a manager such as Koffret is free for fourteen days so the result can be judged on a real bar rather than a screenshot.