The challenges of building your own macOS app

A development team started building a simple, open source macOS app as a side project, but the road turned out to be much more complicated than expected. In this article we look back at the different stages of that journey, including:

• how the app for muting and unmuting the microphone with a keyboard shortcut or a Touch Bar icon was built;
• why the open source approach didn't live up to expectations;
• what limitations Apple placed on the Touch Bar that made it almost useless for what was needed.

The app, Mutify, was launched on Product Hunt, where its team gathered feedback and support from the community.

💡The initial idea

The idea came from a very common problem: spending a good part of the day on calls, talking about tasks, solutions, and plans with technical teams from different projects. On those calls it's common to want to keep the microphone muted whenever you're not speaking. But if you switch browser tabs during the meeting or look at a presentation, it's hard to unmute quickly while you hunt for the right tab and icon. The solution that came up was to make use of a 2016 MacBook with a Touch Bar and add a mute button to it. That's where the journey that eventually led to the app began.

From open source to a paid app

The team believed in open source, so the first version of the app was developed as an open project, using its own resources. It was released, promoted a little, and got positive feedback, but some bugs also showed up. macOS turned out to be more troublesome than expected. Among the specific issues were:

• conflicts with other apps trying to control the microphone
• compatibility across different versions of macOS
• limitations imposed by Apple that required deep investigation

The hope was that the app's community would grow steadily and contributors capable of helping with issues would show up. Unfortunately, that didn't happen. From day one, all the development was done by the team itself: open source in Swift turned out to be very different from JS or PHP communities, where you can count on small fixes from outside developers. The lack of a community to lend a hand is one of the biggest weaknesses of macOS development.

The project reached 159 stars on GitHub, more than 8,000 installs, and zero contributors. Even so, the app still had a lot of work ahead of it, so the team decided to rebuild it from scratch and switch to a paid model to guarantee at least some funding for its development and future improvements. That's how Mutify was born.

Mutify features

Mute and unmute the microphone

Mute and unmute the microphone with a quick key or with an always-available Touch Bar icon.

Noise level

Shows the ambient noise level at any given moment, so you know when it's a good idea to mute yourself.

Compatible with many apps

Works with Hangouts, Zoom, GoToMeeting, Skype, Telegram, etc. The various calling apps try to control the microphone, but the app lets you keep control.

The difficulties of developing apps for macOS

There were problems in almost every phase of development. It was hard to build a fully custom interface, since standard components weren't an option. While developing a low-level muting method, some apps re-enabled the microphone without any user action or warning. For example, after muting the microphone and showing it as disabled in macOS settings, GoToMeeting or GoToWebinar would turn it back on as soon as they detected it was muted. When this was raised with those apps' support teams, they insisted it was the correct behavior. From an outside perspective, this is concerning, since it suggests meeting apps want to listen to you all the time. It took some fairly convoluted workarounds to make sure the microphone stayed muted when it was supposed to.

From day one, the expectation was that Apple would expand the Touch Bar API's features, but so far there haven't been any changes. The Touch Bar API has a lot of limitations that keep developers from building software that could be useful.

For example:

• Third-party apps can't appear in the list of Touch Bar actions within the "Customize Touch Bar" settings;
• You can only add one icon for a third-party app, which is always shown on the Touch Bar next to Apple's own tools;

These limitations greatly reduce the options for extending Touch Bar functionality. That's why the app also allows muting with a quick key. Even for a simple, single-action app, it takes time to develop features like:

• Onboarding screens
• Update system
• Integrated payments
• Launch at login
• Keyboard shortcut support
• Website

Effort = quality

The main lesson from this project is that doing something well always demands a lot of work from different people with different skills, including some that have nothing directly to do with the app's core function. In the end, the positive feedback from users and the satisfaction of using your own app made the effort worthwhile.

You can check out Mutify's listing on Product Hunt. At launch, the app offered a 30% discount and a seven-day free trial.