Apparency for Mac
Check what's inside an app.
Free
In English
Version 2.3When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission
Apparency overview
Apparency - the app that opens apps.
macOS checks every app against a slew of security features: Gatekeeper, notarization, hardening, entitlements and more. But it doesn't show you the result of these checks, preferring to keep these behind the scenes — either the app opens or it doesn't, perhaps with an “app downloaded from the internet” dialog first.
Use Apparency for:
- Examining the App Structure
- Getting Information About a Component
- General Information
- Document Types and Other Info.plist Properties
- Code Signature, Sandbox and Gatekeeper Info
- Getting Details About a Component
- Show the Code Signature
- Show the Info Property List
- Show the Entitlements
- Show Executable Information
- Show App Store Receipt
- Show Provisioning Profile
- Examining Components in Other Apps
- Finding App Containers
- Finding Shared App Group Containers
- Using From Quick Look
What’s new in version 2.3
- Changed the info pane to show Quarantine rather than Downloaded. Modern macOS likes to quarantine files that are opened by a sandboxed app, seemingly resulting in more non-download quarantines than actual downloads. You can still click on the quarantine date here to see what app triggered it and how — for example, “Downloaded by Safari” (for a true download) or “Opened by Hex Editor” (for a sandboxed app). If the quarantine has already triggered a Gatekeeper prompt (and you proceeded with opening the item anyway, in whatever tortured way macOS now requires), the quarantine text is grayed out.
- Fixed a couple of scenarios where opening a bare Mach-O executable would result in macOS unnecessarily quarantining the file on Apparency's behalf, possibly resulting in subsequent confusing Gatekeeper alerts. macOS pretty much always quarantines a file when a sandboxed app gains write access to it. Since Apparency doesn't request write access (it declares itself a strict “viewer” in both its Info.plist and entitlements), this won't happen when using the File > Open dialog. However, when you drag an executable from the Finder, Apparency might receive read-write access from that. Likewise, if you use the appy CLI tool — which is, by necessity, unsandboxed — it would hand over read-write access (if the invoking user had it). Anyway, Apparency now explicitly checks for and demotes such access to be read-only, in order to avoid these confusing quarantines as much as possible. [Read More]
- Enhanced File > Open System Component to find launchd jobs based on the names of Mach services that they provide. Previously, it would match only to the launchd job labels, which are sometimes similar to the service names, but sometimes not.
- Added the linker-assigned UUID to the Executable Information inspector.
- Fixed a bug where Component > Show Launch Information might do nothing, for certain configurations where the NSFixedPitchFont global preference is set to a font family that doesn't have a bold variant.
- Fixed a bug in the Quick Look preview where the placeholder text for missing attributes (such as “macOS requirement unknown” or “No identifier”) might be difficult to read in Dark Mode, depending on the background.
- The appy command line tool has a new ‑‑show-components (-c) option, to show the details of an app's components right in Terminal, without launching the Apparency app. This gives information such as bundle identifiers, versions, signing identities, and various flags (Gatekeeper, notarization, etc), all in a single plain text table. You can customize which columns are included using the ‑‑add-column (-C) option. There is also a new ‑‑quiet (-q) option to inhibit status messages and other niceties, in order to make extracting bits from stdout easier. Run appy with no arguments for updated usage, and see the User Guide for an example..
Apparency for Mac
Free
In English
Version 2.3
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