I built 3 macOS menu bar apps in my spare time — here's what I learned

I've been a Mac user for years and kept running into
the same small frustrations daily. Instead of waiting
for Apple to fix them, I built 3 tiny apps myself.

Here's what I built and why.

🔊 Sound Warden — Per-app audio routing

Every time I jumped between Spotify, Zoom, and YouTube
I had to manually switch audio outputs. It drove me crazy.

Sound Warden lives in your menu bar and automatically
routes each app to the audio device you want. Set it
once, forget it forever.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sound-warden/id6762252431

✕ Clean Quit — Quit all apps in one click

End of the day. 15 apps open. Closing them one by one.

Clean Quit adds a single menu bar button that quits
everything instantly. Add a whitelist for apps you
always want running and it skips those automatically.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/clean-quit/id6763597949

☀️ Glowix — Smart display sleep preventer

My screen kept going dark mid-presentation, mid-recipe,
mid-video call.

Glowix prevents your display from sleeping on demand.
One click in the menu bar — no digging through System
Settings ever again.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/glowix/id6763359033

What I learned building these

1. Scratch your own itch
Every single one of these came from a personal
frustration. That's the best product research you can do.

2. Shipping beats perfecting
I could have kept adding features forever. Instead I
shipped. Real users give better feedback than my own
imagination.

3. Menu bar apps are underrated
Small, focused, always accessible. The menu bar is the
perfect home for utility apps on macOS.

4. The App Store review process is smoother than
I expected
All 3 passed review without major issues. Just follow
the guidelines carefully.

What's next

I have a pipeline of more macOS utilities I'm planning
to build. If you want to follow along, check out my
apps on Product Hunt.

If you've been sitting on a small app idea — just build
it. The worst case is you learned something. The best
case is you ship something people actually use every day.