Mac menu bar apps: which to keep and which to hide

Count the icons on the right side of your menu bar right now. Most people who go looking for this topic land somewhere between twelve and twenty, and can name the purpose of maybe half of them. The row started as a place for battery level and the clock, and it has become the default parking spot for every application that wants to stay running in the background. The question is not how to get rid of Mac menu bar apps. Several of them are genuinely useful. The question is which ones have earned a permanent seat, and what to do with the rest.

What actually lives up there

The menu bar has two halves that behave completely differently. The left side belongs to whichever app is in front, and its contents change every time you switch windows. The right side is the status area, and that is where every app that wants to be reachable at all times puts an icon. Everything in this article is about the right side.

Apple provides some of those items. Battery, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, sound, Time Machine, screen mirroring, Focus, the clock, and the input source indicator are all supplied by macOS itself. Everything else was put there by an app you installed. Cloud sync clients, VPN switches, password managers, clipboard history, screenshot tools, note apps, chat apps, music controllers, download managers, developer tooling, and updaters all conventionally place a status item, often without asking.

The reason this becomes a problem rather than a convenience is that the row has no way to compact itself. Windows can be stacked, minimised, or moved to another Space. Status items can only sit side by side, so the row grows in one direction until it runs into whatever is on the left. On a MacBook with a notch, what it runs into is the notch, and items pushed that far along disappear underneath it. Growth turns from cosmetic to functional at that point.

Three kinds of menu bar app, and why the distinction settles everything

Every icon in the row falls into one of three groups. Sorting them before touching any setting is what separates a setup that lasts from one that unravels in a week.

The first group is what you read. Battery percentage, the clock, an input source flag, a recording indicator, a VPN connection state. You never click these. Their whole value is being visible at a glance, and hiding them defeats the point. This group should stay in the visible row, and for most people it is only three to five items.

The second group is what you press. Clipboard history, the audio output switcher, a screenshot tool, a window manager, a quick note capture. You do not need to see these, but you do need to reach them quickly, sometimes several times an hour. This group does not belong in the visible row, but it does need to be one action away, and how well a given tool handles this group is the single biggest difference between menu bar managers.

The third group is what you neither read nor press. Sync clients that only matter when something breaks, updaters, launchers, and apps that install a status item purely by convention. For most people this is the largest group of the three, sometimes more than half the row. Nothing is lost by removing these entirely.

Doing this sort on paper first takes about five minutes and makes every subsequent decision mechanical. Skipping it is why people hide everything on a Monday and have dragged half of it back by Friday.

The categories that usually earn a permanent seat

It helps to know what other people end up keeping, not to copy it, but to check your own row against a reasonable baseline.

Status that changes on its own and matters when it changes tends to stay visible. Battery percentage on a laptop, the clock, an active recording or screen sharing indicator, the input source when you type in more than one language, and a VPN state when your work depends on being on the right network. All of these are read rather than pressed, and all of them are worth a glance rather than a click.

Tools you invoke many times an hour usually belong in the reachable group rather than the visible one. Clipboard history is the clearest example, since almost everyone drives it with a keyboard shortcut and never touches the icon. Audio output switching earns its place on a desk with more than one output device. Window management, screenshot and screen recording utilities, and quick capture into a notes app follow the same pattern: the shortcut does the work, and the icon is a fallback.

The ones that most often turn out to be removable are background services that report a state you would notice anyway. A cloud sync client tells you it is syncing, but you find out about a real failure through a file that is missing, not through a small icon. App updaters do their job on a schedule regardless of whether their icon exists. Launchers and menu bar front ends for apps you open from Spotlight are duplicating something you already have. None of these are bad apps. They just do not need a seat in a row with a hard limit on how many seats there are.

What macOS can hide without any extra software

A useful share of the row can be cleared with no installation at all, and this step costs nothing, so it is worth doing before evaluating any product.

In System Settings, under Control Centre, each of the built in items has its own control. Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, sound, Time Machine, screen mirroring, Focus, and Now Playing can each be set to show always, show only when active, or not show in the menu bar at all. The clock has its own settings, including whether to show the date, the day of the week, and seconds. Battery can be shown with or without a percentage. Spotlight's icon can be removed while the keyboard shortcut keeps working, which surprises people, since the shortcut is how almost everyone uses it anyway.

Third party apps are the other half. A large number of them have a hide option in their own preferences, usually phrased as show icon in menu bar or run in background. It is not standardised and it is not always easy to find, but going through the settings window of your five noisiest apps often turns up two or three that can simply be switched off.

What none of this can do is hide the icon of an app that provides no such setting, and it cannot reorder or group what remains. That residue is precisely the gap that a menu bar manager fills, and it is worth finding out how big your residue actually is before deciding you need one.

When a menu bar manager earns its place

If, after the free pass above, the row is still long enough that you scan it, a manager is the right tool. These apps work by dividing the status area into a visible section and one or more hidden sections, then giving you a way to reveal the hidden part on demand.

The realistic options, stated as facts and checked on 5 September 2026 against each vendor's own page:

Option	Price	macOS support	Source
Ice	Free, GPL-3.0 open source	macOS 14 or later	github.com
Bartender 6	One time purchase from $12, plus a yearly Pro tier and a lifetime tier	Built for macOS Tahoe and Sequoia, with the same licence covering Bartender 5 for older systems	macbartender.com
macOS Control Centre settings	Included	All current versions	support.apple.com

Feature lists across this category look more similar than the products actually are, because the thing that differs most does not appear on a feature list. It is what happens to your second group, the icons you press. In some designs, reaching a hidden icon means revealing the hidden section, locating the icon in the expanded row, and then clicking it. That is three actions replacing one. A design that lets you press a hidden icon and open its menu with the bar still collapsed keeps the cost at a single press, which over a working day is the difference people actually feel. The How it compares page sets out where the tools in this category diverge on exactly that point.

The notch, and why it is a separate problem

On MacBook Pro and MacBook Air models with a notch, the menu bar is physically split in two. Status items fill from the right, and once there are enough of them the leftmost ones slide under the notch, where they cannot be seen or clicked. Nothing warns you. The icon is simply gone, and the app appears to have stopped putting one there.

Hiding items helps directly, because a shorter row never reaches that far. But there is a second order effect worth testing: when a manager expands its hidden section, the expanded row is longer than the collapsed one, and that expanded row can itself run into the notch. Anyone on a notched MacBook should make this the first thing they check with any tool, before spending time on anything else. Reducing the number of items you keep in the reveal section is the reliable fix, which is another reason the three way sort matters.

Setting it up in the right order

Do it in this sequence and it takes about twenty minutes once, then stays stable.

Sort every icon into read, press, and neither. Write it down if the row is long. Then go into System Settings and turn off every built in item that landed in the neither group. Then open the preferences of each third party app in the neither group and turn off its status item there, uninstalling anything you no longer use at all. Only now, look at what is left. If the remaining row is short enough to scan instantly, stop. You are finished and you have installed nothing.

If it is still crowded, install a manager and give it only two jobs: keep the read group visible, and put the press group somewhere reachable in one action. Resist the urge to also configure spacing, tinting, and grouping on day one. Those are refinements, and adding them before the basic arrangement has survived a week of real use makes it much harder to tell what is working. The Features page covers what a tool in this category should be able to do, and common questions about the arrangement are answered on the FAQ page.

What to change first

Open System Settings, go to Control Centre, and turn off every built in item you do not actually read. Then count what is left. That single step takes ten minutes, costs nothing, and tells you whether you have a settings problem or a genuine need for a manager. If it turns out to be the latter, and reaching a hidden icon in one press is what you want, Koffret is built for that case.