How to read the facts

• How is a Mac app priced?

  The three ways a Mac app is sold — free, a one-off purchase, or a subscription — how to tell which you are looking at, and where we read it from.

  Across the board, 2 of the 8 apps listed have an established price model: 0 free, 2 a one-off purchase and 0 a subscription. The rest are blank because we have not read a pricing page for them yet.

• Is this Mac app native or Electron?

  What native, Electron, Catalyst and Java actually mean for a Mac app, how the reading is taken from the app bundle, and why native is not a compliment.

• Does this Mac app run natively on Apple Silicon?

  What an arm64 build means on an M-series Mac, how Rosetta fills the gap for Intel-only apps, and where this site reads the architectures from.

• Is this Mac app still maintained?

  What a release date does and does not tell you about whether a Mac app is abandoned, where the date comes from, and why a quiet app is often a finished one.

• What does it mean when a Mac app is sandboxed?

  What Apple's App Sandbox restricts, why a sandboxed app has to ask before reaching your files, and why not being sandboxed is normal rather than alarming.

• What does notarised mean for a Mac app?

  What Apple checks when it notarises a Mac app, what the developer signature tells you, and why neither is a review of whether the app is any good.

• Why does a Mac app ask for access to my files and camera?

  What the permission prompts on macOS actually are, which ones a Mac app has to declare in advance, and which never appear in an app bundle at all.

• What do the Homebrew install numbers mean?

  Where the install counts on this board come from, why they are comparable between apps but not a user total, and which apps have no count at all.

Every fact on a listing is read from a source and shows the date it was read. How the checking works.