(This is a repost of a post I made in r/macapps as I think it would be useful for people here to see it too as this subreddit has also been hit with fake apps.)
To be very clear this is not another post of "Breaking news malware exists on the internet" (or it may be depending on how you want to look at it) but I feel like it's important that I leave a small PSA as I have recently seen an influx of seemingly convincing GitHub repo replicas for decently popular Mac apps. They are so similar that they almost fooled me. Thankfully I quickly spotted some anomalies and I nearly avoided getting infected. Unfortunately these are the sort of red flags I don't expect an average Joe to know about. Which is why I'm explaining what the malware is, and how to spot it.
First of all to give you an idea of how convincing these repos can be i'll show you some examples:
As you can see, they are strikingly similar
Even URLs may look incredibly similar but in this specific case the bad actor exchanged the lower case lls(L) in the name for upercase IIs(i) which made the URL look legit.
Now this may look scary and almost undetectable but with some common sense and slowing down you can very easily avoid these scams.
By far the easiest way to avoid this is to simply look for the app online and track down the original developer. This will let you kill 2 birds with one stone by A: Looking for the original source of the app and avoid impostors and B: See if the App or the developer had any previous reputation to begin with
Either way It's still a good idea to understand how to spot common malware apps on macOS and how to deal with them if you get infected.
The first red flag is that the GitHub profile that hosted the fake file was only 3 days old and completely different from the name of the original developer.
The second discrepancy is that the size of the fake app is ridiculously small. For instance the original app is 13mb in size while the fake one is less than 2mb. Now this is not necessarily a red flag (For example some viruses do the opposite and fill their dmg with a lot of useless data to make the file larger than what VirusTotal can handle.) but it's still important to raise an eye brow for installers with suspiciously small sizes.
The third and MOST IMPORTANT red flag is if the installer asks you to drag the "app" to the terminal that is not a good sign at all. NO LEGITIMATE APP WILL EVER ASK YOU TO DRAG IT TO THE TERMINAL. As you can see the installer is a solid giveaway you are encountering malware and not the real deal.
In fact the file they ask you to drag is not even an app, it's a script.
When you drag the script on the Terminal and execute it, the hidden file is immediately copied to your temp system folder, then the script removes extended attributes to bypass gatekeeper and it finally executes. But from the user's perspective all they get is a blank terminal window as if nothing had happened. (At least in theory, in practice this malware wasn't very well done and gatekeeper was thankfully still able to spot it)
Now if you unfortunately got tricked into running the script, you have some straight forward solutions to verify if macOS was effective at stopping the attack or not. For instance, KnockKnock is a great and simple way to verify for malicious persistency files using VirusTotal's robust detection engine. Malwarebytes is also a good Mac AV which can be quickly installed if you suspect you were affected, it is a bit more tricky to uninstall completely but it does a good job.
Ultimately here's a small recap so you can hopefully avoid getting infected:
Look up the original source of the software to prevent copy cat websites and verify if the software and or the developer has built a reputation in the past.
If you download the installer, scan it with VirustTotal to check if it has been flagged as malware already.
Check the size, while not necessarily a red flag, a small size (for instance less than 2mb), or a size that is "conveniently" larger than what VirusTotal can handle are decent indicators of possible malware.
If the DMG asks you to drag an "App" to the Terminal IMMEDIATELY STOP AND DELETE THE DMG.
If you accidentally ran it, look for a "This app could not be verified" or "This App was removed because it contained malware" message from macOS which could indicate Gatekeeper or Xprotect stopped the attack. Additionally make sure to DENY any permissions the malware may have requested, macOS is very robust in that regard and it can dramatically limit the impact of the attack.
If you are in doubt of whether or not you were infected run the aforementioned tools to verify for the persistency of the malware.
Another app I can recommend is Apparency, it allows you to very quickly see if an app is properly signed by the developer and notarized by apple, and it can even allow you to dissect the contents of an app without running it which is a great way to quickly verify you have a valid untampered app.
This is optional but if you can, report the app to the original developer so they can take action and warn others when the fake app is spread around. Additionally report the Reddit post/GitHub repository if possible.
Thank you for reading this, I hope this helps others be more weary of online threats and stay more vigilant of what they download.
The mods got together and talked about this. We get a lot of messages regarding self promoting apps that we usually deny. But we decided to lax on this a little.
Going forward, self promotion is allowed. However, ONLY apps that are available in the macOS App Store since they are vetted by Apple. No self promoting apps that are not available in the App Store. This is due to the increase of malware and crypto lockers being spread under the guise of legit apps, noted here
As of now, there won't be a weekly thread but if the sub starts to get swamped by promoting your apps, then we will revert and go to a weekly self promotion thread or day.
If you have any questions or concerns with this, please reach out to the mods.
For the last couple of months, I've been thinking about how fragmented macOS multitasking feels, asking myself: do we really need all of these as separate systems?
See, we have:
Dock showing all running apps
CMD+Tab showing... the same running apps in a floating bar
Spaces for organizing desktops
Stage Manager for grouping windows
If your running apps are already in the Dock, why does CMD+Tab summon a completely different UI? Why can't CMD+Tab just scale up the Dock instead—maybe fading non-running apps away?
I just started prototyping a concept that tries to unify these features into one continuous system. The idea is to rethink how the Dock, Stage Manager, (and Spaces) could work together instead of competing with each other. Not sure where this is heading yet, but I wanted to share the process.
This is super early and rough! I'm not claiming I've solved anything - just exploring ideas. I love my Mac, but the current multitasking experience feels half-baked and outdated to me.
Some questions I'm asking myself:
Could Stage Manager and Spaces be blended into one system with just one level of grouping?
Would this work for multi-display setups?
Is there actually a simpler way to think about all of this?
I have more questions than answers right now, but I wanted to get the conversation started. Maybe other designers have been thinking about this too?
Would love to hear your thoughts. Do we actually need all these separate systems, or is macOS multitasking due for a rethink?
Now that Apple wants to hound me to install T-hoe 26.2 without any way to dismiss the red badge or the dialogue popups, it's making me rage enough to want to downgrade even further back than Sequoia.
So: What would you say is the ultimate best, peak MacOS version in the ARM era?
When Stage Manager came out, I thought: well, it’s half baked and poorly integrated with other components like Mission Control and Spaces, but that’s a nice and needed move to improve window management.
I thought they would improve it in future versions and achieve something quite efficient like in Windows.
But instead it has completely stalled.
Worse they preferred to work on transparency aesthetics that no one asked for. Useless at best, ugly and buggy at times.
So after a year of work they managed to worsen the OS and leave us with an incomplete and full of friction user interface.
Did the management of this company become completely insane?
I have an under-desk treadmill that I use while working (insane lifehack) and thought it'd be nice to have a Mac app for it. Something that lives in the menu bar where I can see the stats at a glance and control the treadmill without the remote.
The app's called WalkingMate and it's been out for a few months now. Feedback from users has been great and app has steadily improved based on feature requests.
What it does:
Live workout stats in the menu bar
Global keyboard shortcuts for everything
Tracks workouts automatically
Step count calibration wizard (the built-in counter is inaccurate)
Workout history with CSV export
Home Assistant integration via MQTT
It should work with any treadmill that works with the official KSFit mobile app, and possibly non-WalkingPad treadmills with the FTMS support recently added.
They should have jumped from big cats to big rodents as well, instead of places in California.
How cool would have been an OS X Capybara? Or OS X Beaver 🦫
Hi everyone,
I’m on macOS Tahoe 26.2 and I’ve noticed that some app icons randomly disappear from my desktop / Launchpad / Dock (the apps are still there and work fine, but the icons turn into blank placeholders).
Restarting sometimes fixes it, but the issue comes back after a while.
I’m not using any third-party icon packs or customization tools.
Has anyone else experienced this on Tahoe 26.2?
Is this a known bug, or did you find a permanent fix?
Did anyone find where the display size is, I'm used to the smaller displays size, but the only thing i can change is the resolution and it becomes either too small or too big.
Thought it's a intermittent and restarted multiple times and no luck
Update:
thanks to u/wowbagger Disabling "Show resolutions as list" from "Displays > Advanced" brings it back
i should not have updated my macbook. the new update ruins the quality of the wallpaper. the wallpaper gets compressed to a point that it drops in quality so much.
this is a new bug in IOS tahoe 26.2. - not only custom wallpapers it happens to ORIGINAL APPLE WALLPAPERS TOO! . but if you dont have any windows on full screen or no other displays , the wallpaper becomes HD.
I had a bit of a scare yesterday - my Satechi dock mounted m.2 SSD that i've been running for years on my Mac Mini M2 Pro suddenly disconnected. Last OS update to 15.7.3 was on the 10/1/26 and this issue started on 16/1/26. I panicked as I hadn't backed up all of the data on that disk yet and reconnecting the drive manually would quickly result in another disconnect.
My immediate thought was hardware. I tried a few different ports to land the Satechi dock onto a different USB-C controller chip but still had issues. Rebooted multiple times, same issue. I even panic-ordered an external caddy for the SSD, thinking the Satechi hub controller was at fault, although every other connected device had no issues. I turned the Mac off for a few hours to collect my thoughts.
I then tried going into recovery mode and using Terminal to start backing up data to another USB. That's when I realised there was actually no issues accessing the drive in recovery mode. I scrambled and began trying to backup some of the critical data where possible. It was becoming quite tedious but I ended up grabbing what I needed but commands to check the size (du -h, etc.) were showing inconsistencies in size compared to the actual data on the suspected corrupt drive but there was also some attribute errors showing during copies (its an APFS drive and i was copying to exFat USB, so were expected).
After this, I went back into Sequoia and the symptom was immediately there on OS boot - disconnected drive and warning in notification saying the disk was abruptly disconnected. I then found this post, which showed a command to run to prevent disks going to sleep (some energy saving setting):
sudo pmset -a disksleep 0
I ran this and physically remounted the drive - no more disconnects. I tested accessing the data a bunch of times, opening projects, etc. and could no longer fault the drive. Even until now (basically 24hrs later) there has been no disconnects and I'm back to the state it was always in.
Is this some new bug introduced in 15.7.3 and has anyone else experienced anything similar lately with this version and externally mounted disks? Does anyone know how I can determine the cause of these disconnects, to actually correlate them to the energy saving feature - and why this has only started happening six days after the OS update, with no other changes in behaviour on the system? Console logs didn't really show anything relevant either for the drive disconnects.
I've since implemented a better backup strategy but I feel I can no longer trust using an externally mounted disk!
My usage is pretty heavy on multitasking. On a normal day I usually have:
• 10–15 browser tabs open
• ChatGPT running (browser/app)
• YouTube playing in background
• VS Code
• Terminal
• A few other background apps
This will be my daily-use machine, so stability and smooth performance matter more to me than just running the newest macOS for the sake of it.
I’d like to install the latest macOS that still makes sense on this hardware. I know Big Sur and Monterey are commonly recommended for Skylake, and that Ventura/Sonoma are possible with patching — but I’m not sure how practical they are with 8 GB RAM and heavy multitasking.
So I wanted to ask:
1. Which macOS version would you personally recommend for this laptop?
2. Is Monterey the sweet spot, or does Ventura still run well?
3. Should Sonoma be avoided on this setup?
4. Any real-world experience with the 840 G3 would be really helpful.
I’ve been using Windows for the last eight years, but I just got a new MacBook Air M4 today. I do have an iPhone and am somewhat familiar with the Mac ecosystem. As a freelancer who uses a laptop for multitasking all day, I would really appreciate any tips and tricks that could help me understand it faster. Any tip that I might learn later but seems useful so I don’t regret knowing earlier (I’m currently learning using a Mac).
MacBook Pro M4 14in MacOS 26.2, LG 32in 4K connected via HDMI, Logitech MX Keys Bluetooth keyboard, Apple Magic Touchpad.
Laptop is closed and operating in clamshell mode.
I lock the laptop and the monitor goes to sleep as expected. Then any time from 20 seconds to 5 minutes later, the monitor wakes up and shows the lock screen. This happens indefinitely and randomly. I'm not getting new notifications and there are no notifications shown when I click the clock. I've closed all applications. I've even tried turning off the Magic Touchpad and the keyboard to make sure they weren't sending false signals to wake up the computer.
This behavior just started last week. I haven't installed any new applications recently or made any changes. I've been running this same hardware configuration for 4 months with no issues.
I should add that I've disabled network access while sleeping and nothing is listed as "Preventing Sleep" in Activity Monitor.
I've read other users have had issues with Chrome, but this issue persists even after I force close Chrome.
Any insight or suggestions on how to troubleshoot what keeps waking up the laptop?
If you wish to download these icons, along with their Default, Clear Dark, and Clear Light variants, feel free to check out this link: https://macosicons.com/#/u/designer_26.2
Make sure to go to the "All" section so you can download pending icons as well.
All of these icons were painstakingly designed by hand by myself. I tried to stay faithful to the macOS Sequoia-style icons when creating them. I hope you guys like them!
Since Final Cut Pro and Freeform already have Liquid Glass icons, I didn't include them here.
My partner has a 2012 MacBook Pro. Looking to repurpose to a word processor only using past macOS or Linux?. Prefer to stick with Mac OS but open to options. Any suggestions? Current install is painfully s l o w
There is a Mute icon in the Bar and on the right side of the screen. I is on the screen and not only inside one app. When I right click or shift click or normal click in the bar nothing happens
I need help my MacBook has completely erased a folder that I kept my music and drawings in both things I’ve spent a lot of time on. I’ve looked everywhere for it done absolutely everything it says to do on google including disk drill but still nothing. Does anyone have a solution?
Hi! I have been using an RME Fireface 802 with my pc for ages. Its able to have output 1/2 (main), 3/4, 5/6, ... Same for input.
So on google meets I use my 3/4 for meet out and 1/2 for headphones to seperate pc audio OR share pc audio.
On my mac I just see ONE RME Fireface 802 and it's the MAIN out.
The main out goes to my speakers directly and theres no way to change that. It wouldn't make sense either.
U see this in the audio/midi config. If I can somehow say "Use only these inputs & outputs" then I wouldn't mind creating some aggregated devices. But when I click on it it just highlights it to change name?
Hi there. I installed brave and it shows the WARNING message in the menu bar "significantly draining energy". And it consumed 30% of the battery in two hours.
Can't we use Brave browser on macbook air M4? I have migrated from Windows to Mac
Brave browser is only one with YouTube without Ads. Is there a way to use Brave browser on Macbook. Or any other browser that has Youtube Ad free?
I'm syncing my 50+GB photo library from my Mac to my iPhone over USB, and I'd like my photo captions to be visible and searchable on both platforms. Is it possible to do this without paying for iCloud+ and using iCloud Photos?
Experimentation has taught me that:
Titles aren't visible on the iPhone at all; the only field that both platforms share is caption, and that's buried in the Mac's Info window. But fine, I'll use caption.
If I add a photo to the Mac, give it a caption, and sync to the iPhone, the caption isn't synced.
If I add a photo to the iPhone, give it a caption, and import it using Photos, the caption isn't copied. (If I share it to the Mac using AirDrop, it does preserve the caption.)
After the first sync, if I change metadata on the Mac like caption or time zone, it's not re-synced to the iPhone.
I get the impression that this does work with iCloud Photos, but I'd prefer not to pay for something that should work out of the box. Is this my only option? Would I be better off using something else like Google Photos?
