Is Bartender for Mac still maintained? The 2026 record

The question comes up for a specific reason. Bartender was the default answer for menu bar clutter on macOS for well over a decade, then in mid 2024 the app changed hands without an announcement, and a lot of people quietly stopped recommending it. If you are about to pay for it, or you already own a license and are wondering whether to keep going, the useful thing is not opinion but the record: what version exists now, who publishes it, which macOS releases it targets, and what actually happened. All of it is checkable, and all of it is below.

The short answer, with dates

Yes. As of 5 September 2026, Bartender is being published and updated. The current version is Bartender 6, the site states it is built for macOS Tahoe and Sequoia, and the copyright line at the bottom of the page reads Applause Group, Inc. with a 2026 date. A product shipping a major version aimed at the two most recent macOS releases is, by any practical definition, maintained.

That answer needs a qualifier, though, because "maintained" and "maintained by the people you originally bought it from" are different statements, and the gap between them is the reason this search term exists at all. The app is alive. The company behind it is not the one that built it. Whether that matters is a judgment each person makes for themselves, and making it well requires knowing what happened rather than absorbing the tone of a forum thread.

Source for the current state: macbartender.com, checked 5 September 2026.

What happened in 2024

In early June 2024, a user posted that the app updater service MacUpdater had flagged something unusual about a Bartender update. The app's signing certificate had changed. Digging into it revealed that Bartender had been sold, and that the sale had happened roughly three months earlier, in the first part of 2024. No announcement had been made to customers at the time of the sale.

The buyer was Applause Group. The new owners responded in the same discussion thread and confirmed the acquisition. Their explanation for the certificate change was that the app had to be re-signed with Apple under the new company's details in place of the original developer's, which produced a one time certificate shift. What they did not address at that point was why customers had not been told, and the combination of a silent ownership transfer, a certificate change, and reporting about telemetry added to the app produced a sustained reaction across the Mac community.

Ben Surtees, who created Bartender and had developed it for years, later confirmed the sale publicly and spoke well of the new owners. Coverage of the sequence ran across the Mac press through the first week of June 2024.

Bartender, the most popular app to manage your Mac's menu bar items, silently sold to a new owner, with no official announcement made at the time of the sale. Source: macrumors.com

The developer's own confirmation was reported at 9to5mac.com on 6 June 2024.

Two years on, the practical relevance of the episode is not the incident itself but what it taught people to check. An app that sits in the menu bar has accessibility permissions and can see the status items of every other app you run. That is a legitimate reason to care who publishes it, independently of whether any particular owner has done anything wrong.

What Bartender is now

Setting history aside, this is the shape of the product as its own site describes it on 5 September 2026.

Aspect	What the site states
Current version	Bartender 6
Price	Buy from $12, as a one time purchase
Other tiers	Bartender Pro on a yearly subscription, and a Mega Supporter tier with lifetime access
macOS support	Built for macOS Tahoe and Sequoia
Older macOS	A Bartender 6 license also works with Bartender 5
Upgrades	The one time purchase includes all updates to that version. Pro and Mega Supporter include future major upgrades
Existing owners	Bartender 5 purchases made in 2025 upgrade free, earlier purchases get a discount
Devices	A license works across all your Macs
Publisher	Applause Group, Inc.

The tier structure is worth reading carefully, because the words do different work. A one time purchase of Bartender 6 covers updates to Bartender 6. It does not cover Bartender 7. Pro and Mega Supporter are the tiers that carry future major versions. Anyone deciding between them is really deciding how often they expect to want the newest major version, which for a utility of this kind tends to track how often they upgrade macOS.

The macOS line is also the practical constraint for older machines. Bartender 6 targets the two newest releases, and older systems are served by Bartender 5 under the same license. If a Mac is on something older still, that is the first thing to check before anything else, and Apple publishes the compatibility list at support.apple.com.

How to check whether any Mac utility is still maintained

The Bartender question is a specific instance of a general one, and the general version is worth being able to answer without waiting for someone else to write an article. Four checks cover it, and they take a few minutes.

Look at the release notes or version history, not the marketing page. What matters is the date of the most recent release and whether releases have been arriving with any regularity. A single release six months ago followed by nothing says something different from a steady trickle.

Check which macOS versions the current version claims to support. This is the sharpest signal available for a utility that hooks into system UI. Apple ships a major macOS release every autumn, and utilities in this category almost always need work to keep up. A product whose page names the current macOS release by name is being worked on. A product whose page still names a release from three years ago is not, whatever else it says.

Find out who publishes it. For paid software, the copyright line at the foot of the site and the entity named in the App Store listing or the code signature are the record. For open source, the commit history and the issue tracker show both the pace of work and how requests are being handled.

Check whether the app has an update mechanism at all, and whether it has fired recently. An app that has quietly not updated itself in a year while macOS moved twice is telling you something.

Run those four checks against whatever is already installed on your Mac and the result is usually unambiguous within five minutes. The version number lives in the app's About window, the supported macOS versions live on the vendor's page or in the repository's readme, the publisher lives in the copyright line and in the code signature, and the update history lives in the release notes. None of it requires interpreting anyone's opinion. It is worth doing for every menu bar utility you rely on rather than only for the one that has been discussed publicly, because the ones nobody is discussing are the ones most likely to have gone quiet without anybody noticing.

What maintenance has to mean for a menu bar tool specifically

There is a reason this category is more sensitive to abandonment than most. Menu bar utilities do not sit in their own window minding their own business. They read and manipulate the status item area, which is macOS system UI, and they need accessibility permissions to do it. Apple has changed how that area behaves in most recent macOS releases, sometimes visibly and sometimes not. Every tool in this category, paid and free alike, has had a period after some autumn release where things behaved oddly until an update landed.

That means "still maintained" is not a background nicety for this kind of app. It is a functional requirement, on roughly a twelve month cycle. It also means the question should be asked of every candidate, not just the one with a controversy attached. A free open source tool with an active maintainer and a paid tool with a company behind it both pass. A free tool whose last commit was two years ago and a paid tool that never mentions the current macOS both fail, for the same reason.

The other thing to weigh alongside maintenance is how the tool behaves in daily use, because that is what you actually live with. The number that matters is how many actions it takes to reach an icon you have hidden. A tool that lets you press a hidden icon and open its menu without unfolding the bar first turns a three step retrieval back into one press. A breakdown of how the tools in this category differ on that point sits on the How it compares page.

Working out what to do with your own setup

Before comparing products at all, it is worth reducing the problem. A share of menu bar clutter can be cleared with no software beyond what macOS already includes. System Settings has controls for the built in items, so Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, sound, Time Machine, screen mirroring, and the clock elements can each be switched off or set to show only while active. Many third party apps carry their own preference for hiding their status item, usually one line in their settings window. Working through both of those first costs nothing, takes about ten minutes, and for a lot of people removes enough icons that the remaining decision is much smaller. What it will not do is hide the icon of an app that offers no such setting, and that residue is the actual reason this category of tool exists.

If you already own a Bartender license, nothing here is a reason to act urgently. Check which version you have, check whether your macOS release is covered, and decide about upgrading on the ordinary basis of whether the newer version does something you want.

If you are choosing for the first time, the maintenance question is now answered and the decision moves to the ordinary criteria: what it costs, whether it supports your macOS version, and how it feels when you reach for a hidden icon several times a day. Price structures across this category vary more than the feature lists do, and how that shakes out is set out on the Pricing page.

If the 2024 episode is the thing that is bothering you, the honest framing is that it was about disclosure rather than about the software ceasing to work. The app kept shipping, the developer confirmed the sale, and two years later a major version aimed at current macOS exists. Whether a silent ownership transfer is disqualifying is a personal call, and it is a reasonable one to make either way.

What to change first

Open the app you are using now and find its version number and last update date, then compare that against the macOS version your Mac is running. That one comparison answers the maintenance question for whatever you already have, without reading another review. If it comes up short, or if reaching a hidden icon takes more presses than it should, Koffret is worth putting on the shortlist.