Personal productivityOriginal Reddit post

Did macOS 27 DB Break Them (all)?

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Hey everyone. macOS 27 DB has broken many menu bar manager apps such as Thaw, Glow, Barbee, etc. Does anyone know of any menu bar management apps that work well on macOS 27 DB?

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u/mainhathao

This is expected… I spoke to the devs of Thaw and Glow already. They're working on it. However, for Glow, the dev might not release a usable version until July because things might change every developer beta until the public beta, so he doesn’t want to waste time going back and forth until the code is more stable.

u/PsychologicalKnee143

Since this is such an early developer beta, are the devs already aware of the breakage? filing feedback through their trackers usually gets these patched within a beta or two.

u/phunk8

don’t go there on your main system. been there once, never again

u/HelloFovea

Hidden Bar still works on DB1 for me — it's minimal but handles the basics (hide icons, drag to reorder). Not as polished as Barbee but it's been surprisingly resilient across the last few major OS updates. Bartender 5 is also holding up, though it's subscription now so I get why people are looking elsewhere. The common breakage seems to be around the new NSMenuBarExtra sandboxing changes in 27 — anything relying on the old private NSStatusBar APIs is toast. Worth checking if your app of choice has been rebuilt against the newer APIs or if it's still using the deprecated path.

u/Hopeful-Face9676OPReply

Wow. Thank you for that informative piece of information because I did not know that. Hidden Bar didn’t work for me. on my M4 Pro MBP. I use Glow and I’ve contacted the dev, who is awesome and very responsive to any general feedback, bug reports, or feature requests. He’s aware of the issue and is already working on a fix, but said that because of the possibility of ongoing changes, the fix will not be out until a public beta is released. Thanks.

u/Hangry-Scribe

They are all broken. However, the dev of BetterTouchTool says that he may have found a solution and is working on it.

u/yolowagon

BREAKING: major os update beta is breaking stuff developed for the previous OS. more news at 5

u/zphou

For a developer beta this is pretty normal, but the useful thing would be a small compatibility list instead of everyone arguing about whether betas break things. Something like: works on DB1: - app name / version / Mac model broken: - app name / symptom / whether dev acknowledged it A lot of menu bar apps live close to private or semi-private macOS behavior, so the first beta is usually the worst moment to judge them. If the dev already replied and said they’re waiting for public beta, that is probably the sane move.

u/Hopeful-Face9676OPReply

Agreed. As my question at the end suggests, I am looking and hoping for someone to say that "hey, my menu bar manager works in GG" and name it.

u/Jebus-Xmas

I’m not sure if you heard, but it’s a developer beta that isn’t ready for production. Installing this on your main system is borderline senseless. Have a little forethought and do a little research.

u/bog3nator

Here we go another post about this in less than 24 hours..

u/Edge_Audio

It broke Bartender for me. However, new features might have made Bartender unnecessary a it hasn't worked well since MacOS 26...

u/MReprogleReply

Now, expect Bartender to come out with v7 to make you pay for another license in order to work with OS 27, but not release a working version for a month or two after OS 27 is released.

u/Dear_Studio7016

Sorta. I have Home Assistant through raycast, won’t open. It opens for a half second.

u/leonidas_4305

we often forget how good some features and products of Apple’s system are.

u/damnthatwtf

Genuine question, why people immediately update to new OS, I sometimes don’t even update till .5 or .7 version because I want it to get stable enough and enough support from existing apps.

u/LuMe96

Nobody explicitly mentioned that the 27 DB offers a simplified built-in feature to handle overlapping of menu bar icons vs menus. It's far from the options that do offer the 3rd party apps but at least it does work.

u/Medical_Outside7511

Menu bar managers are always going to be fragile around beta season. They depend on behavior Apple clearly does not treat as stable. Not blaming the devs. It is just the risk of building near system UI. I would wait for a few beta cycles before deciding which one is actually broken long term.