Apparency for Mac
Check what's inside an app.
Free
In English
Version 3.3When 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 3.3
- Adopted the "Liquid Glass" appearance for macOS 26 and beyond. We're still not fans, even with the changes in Golden Gate, but we've reached the point of either giving in or giving up — and we're not prepared to give up just yet.
- Improved the handling of certain system libraries that have been moved into the DYLD shared cache. Apparency should now more successfully load system frameworks that have unusual structures (for whatever reason). Also, the appy tool is now more flexible about opening paths from the DYLD shared cache: as long as the given path is somewhere on the system volume (or one its cryptexes), Apparency will try to find it in the shared cache. (This allows you to view the executable information even for frameworks that are otherwise too broken to load.)
- Finessed the way that Apple-signed components are handled after certificate expiration, with respect to the "custom omit rules" that Apple allows itself, such as for App Store apps. This prevents confusing results in the Bundle Resources inspector, for example.
- If the macOS version required for the selected component differs between processor architectures, Apparency now shows an info button info pane info button after the Requires detail: click this for more information.
- Using the Edit > Search Components command, it is now possible to find cases where an array at a specific key path is empty or missing, by using a rule such as Info.plist key path NSExtension.NSExtensionAttributes.QLSupportedContentTypes.@count is not 0.
- Fixed a problem in the rule-based Edit > Search Components UI, where it wasn't possible to use the right/left arrow keys to scroll through a long text field. (Unfortunately, we can't do anything about the size of the text fields here, since the macOS standard rule editor does what it wants, but we can at least make it possible to see the rest of the text.)
- Fixed a bug that could prevent Edit > Select All from working correctly in the component browser.
- Fixed a bunch of long-lingering issues with how the Quick Look Preview is displayed, especially when using View > Show Preview in the Finder List or Column views. You can now reliably hover your pointer over any truncated text to see the full version, and scroll the preview down to view any additional information. (Previously, the only way to get at any cut-off information was to enlarge the preview pane itself.)
- Fixed a problem where clicking Open in Apparency from the Quick Look Preview could trigger a macOS Gatekeeper alert, as if the previewed app itself were being launched. This was annoying and counter-intuitive, since the point of opening the (quarantined) app in Apparency is likely to get more information about that very Gatekeeper status. Now, the Quick Look Preview directly asks Apparency to open the previewed component — using Apparency's URL scheme, as for the appy tool — which both avoids inappropriate Gatekeeper alerts and keeps the quarantine information pristine for any future actual launch of the app.
- Removed support for macOS 13 (Ventura).
Apparency for Mac
Free
In English
Version 3.3
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