For the past 10 years or so, I have been a happy Bartender customer, singing its praises to anyone who’d hear. Alas, macOS Tahoe 26 seems to have broken it beyond repair. Now, I’ll just wait for Apple to inevitably Sherlock its core feature, which I can’t believe hasn’t happened yet.
macOS Tahoe 26 seemingly broke Bartender beyond repair
As someone who lives with the contradiction of always having a little process running in the back of my head to try to minimize cognitive load anywhere I can, I have always loved Bartender’s core feature: the ability to clean up and organize the macOS menu bar by hiding, rearranging, and controlling exactly which icons are visible and when.
Given how much I have always enjoyed its reliability and ease of use, I even stomached the privacy uncertainty that stemmed from Ben Surtees’ decision to sell Bartender to Applause Group in 2024.
Then came macOS Tahoe 26, and with it, a set of under-the-hood changes that completely broke how Bartender 5 worked. Applause developed and quickly released Bartender 6, and it was clear that they were trying their very best to make it work as reliably as Bartender 5 used to work pre-Tahoe.
It didn’t.
From random cursor hijacking and ghost clicks across the interface to reliability issues involving rearranging and hiding menu icons, from performance and memory issues to a constant reindexing of hidden and visible icons that would make the Mac’s menu bar go completely and intrusively bonkers from time to time, having Bartender 6 open meant working on a machine that would frequently behave completely uncontrollably.
And to be clear, once again, it is very clear that Applause worked as fast as it could, and is still working as hard as it can to make the app work properly, given the changes introduced on macOS Tahoe 26.
But this week, after realizing that the cursor issues I had been facing for weeks (where hovers would simply stop registering, or the system would start clicking and dragging items as I moved the cursor across the trackpad) were also tied to Bartender being open, I finally gave up.
And as I shopped around for a replacement, I saw users of competing apps complaining about different reliability, UX, and other issues.
So instead of going through another draining experience with a different set of problems, I just… gave up. I removed any menu item I don’t use or need often (by pressing Command and dragging it away from the menu bar), and will now wait for the day when Apple inevitably introduces a native, Bartender-like feature on macOS.
It’s a shame to see an under-the-hood change break what used to be a perfectly useful app, and I realize it may sound awful to root for an indie app (or even, an entire category) to be Sherlocked. But the truth is that everyone has a limit to how hard they’re willing to fight the OS just to get work done on their computer. I found mine.
Ironically, until macOS Tahoe, I never really thought that Apple might Sherlock Bartender. But now that the system includes a native clipboard manager, advanced keyboard shortcuts, and other niche features, I’ll lean on my inner Lloyd and hold on to the hope that there may be a chance.
Do you have a favorite menu bar management app? Let us know in the comments.
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