Drop Down is in Early Access

Drop Down is out. It is a small Mac app with one job: a tidy menu bar that still has everything in it. You choose the menu bar apps you rarely need, their icons leave the menu bar, and they wait in a small glass panel under one chevron, a click away.

Why a menu bar organizer

The menu bar fills up quietly. A VPN, a cloud drive, a clipboard tool, a utility you opened once: each keeps an icon at the top of the screen, and on a MacBook with a notch there is even less room. macOS 27 hides whatever does not fit behind a small overflow indicator, and System Settings can take an app’s icon off the menu bar altogether, but then it is gone until you switch it back on.

Drop Down sits between the two: the icons you choose are out of the way, and still one click away.

How it works

1. Choose the apps. In the setup, or later in Settings › Menu Bar Items, turn off “Show in menu bar” for the apps you rarely need. The panel’s + button adds one too, even an app whose icon has already been squeezed out of sight.
2. They leave the menu bar. macOS stops drawing their icons, and Drop Down’s chevron stands in for them.
3. Open the panel. Click the chevron, or press ⌃⌥⌘D in any app. A glass panel opens right under it with the hidden icons in a grid, much like the hidden-icons flyout on Windows.
4. Click an icon. That app’s own menu opens, as if you had clicked its icon in the menu bar.

Right-click a cell for the app’s secondary menu, to show its icon in the menu bar again, or to open or quit the app. With Screen Recording allowed, the panel shows each icon as it looks in your menu bar; without it, app icons. The pictures stay on your Mac. Hiding works app by app, because that is how macOS 27 does it: an app with two icons has one switch.

What Basic includes

Basic is free, with no time limit, no account and no license key. It does the whole main job:

• hiding the apps you choose
• the glass panel, with its automatic grid
• real menu bar icons
• the + button
• the default shortcuts: ⌃⌥⌘D for the panel, ⌃⌥⌘H to show every icon
• every safety feature, and updates

What Basic includes stays free.

What Pro adds

Drop Down Pro is for people who want the panel their way:

• fixed grid sizes from 3 × 3 to 6 × 6, or any size up to 8 × 8
• scrolling sideways, or pages with dots
• small, medium or large icons, and a list view with each app’s name
• type to filter, so only the matching apps stay (Basic jumps to the first match)
• your own order: drag icons, use ⌥ with the arrow keys, or sort the list in Settings
• your own panel shortcut

Pro is a one-time purchase, updates included, with no subscription. Supporter is the same Pro on more Macs, for people who want to back an independent developer. The pricing section has both prices and how many Macs each covers. Without Pro, your Pro choices are kept rather than deleted, and the panel shows its Basic layout.

What Early Access means

Every version before 1.0 is Early Access, starting with 0.9.1 on October 1. The app works and is updated often, and on the way to 1.0 its features may still change.

Pro costs less until 1.0, and its price goes up at 1.0. Pro bought during Early Access stays Pro at 1.0 and after: the higher price does not apply to you.

There is no Pro trial: Basic is how you try Drop Down on your own Mac. If Pro then does not work on your Mac as this site describes it, the refund policy explains how you get your money back, and within what time.

What you need

• A Mac with Apple silicon and macOS 27 or later. Intel Macs cannot run it.
• Drop Down in the Applications folder, or a folder inside it: only there does macOS keep its chevron in the menu bar. Started anywhere else, it offers to move itself.
• Accessibility, so Drop Down can find the icons and open hidden ones. Screen Recording is optional.

If anything goes wrong

Hiding deletes nothing and quits nothing; macOS only stops drawing the icons. And there are several ways back:

• Press ⌃⌥⌘H in any app, at any time, and every hidden icon returns to the menu bar. Hiding stays paused until you resume it from the chevron’s menu.
• Quitting brings every icon back, and so do a crash and a force quit: macOS ends the hiding together with Drop Down.
• Hold ⌥ while Drop Down opens, and it starts with hiding paused.
• Two menu bar managers undo each other’s hiding, so while one of the common ones runs, Drop Down pauses and tells you which.

What is planned

Plans, not promises with dates; they may change on the way to 1.0.

• Next, in 0.9.2: a choice of update channel (the default one, or a test channel that gets new builds first), and short release notes in the update window.
• Later in Early Access: your own icon for each app in the panel (a symbol, an emoji or a picture), your own names for apps, panel themes (a tint, a gradient, the glass’s opacity), more than one drop-down, and a dot on hidden apps that have a notification.
• Before 1.0: a revised interface, and more languages. Drop Down speaks English and Turkish today.

Download it, and tell us what breaks

Drop Down is a free download from the home page: open the disk image and drag Drop Down into Applications. It looks for updates once a day through Sparkle (Settings › General can turn that off) and offers a new version in the chevron’s menu and in Settings; nothing is installed until you choose to install it.

Ideas and bugs go to the feedback board, which Send Feedback in Settings › About opens; posts there are public. For a tricky bug, Settings › About › Save Diagnostics Report… writes a plain-text file where you choose. It never contains your license key, and Drop Down never sends it. Keep it off the public board; if a bug needs it, attach it to an email to hello@getdropdown.app.

Thank you for trying Drop Down this early.