5 Mac Apps I Genuinely Regret Not Using Sooner
Install these apps now so you don’t have the same regret as me
Source: Generated by GPT-5.1
As a long-time macOS user, it is always embarrassing when I come across an app that solves an issue that I just accepted as a limitation like a noob.
In the last week alone, I discovered five new apps that made me wonder what I had been doing with my Mac all this time.
Each of these five apps solves a problem I had either given up on or didn’t even realize was fixable.
Let’s get into it.
#1 Beeper — Replace All Your Messaging Apps With One 
Here are eight platforms I regularly use to get in touch with people for personal and professional lives, and also for my fun alter ego.
WhatsApp, X, Slack, Discord, Instagram, LinkedIn, iMessage, and Telegram.
Previously, like a fool unaware of the app Beeper, I was using separate apps or browser tabs to talk to people.
Now that I know about Beeper, which lets you connect all these apps and talk to people across them from a single window, making switching apps as seamless as switching tabs, I am never going back to the old way again.
Source: Screenshot by Author
The free version lets you connect up to 6 platforms to your profile, and the paid version costs $9.99/month and includes a 30-day free trial. But if you are not talking to people across 100 different apps like me, you would probably be okay with the free version.
The app also sprinkles additional features on top of your messaging platforms, like letting you add your chats to a priority list. If you have the paid version, you can also use incognito mode, which doesn’t tell people if you have read their message.
Source: Screenshot by Author
My favorite feature is the all messages view that lets you, you guessed it, view all your messages across all the apps in a single place. Although I don’t love the anxiety of seeing the notification badge on the app icon showing a collective total of all the messages I have yet to read across all the apps.
So, if you are also dealing with the same problem as me and are stuck using individual apps to talk to people, check out Beeper, and come back here to thank me in the comments.
Beeper App - App Store
Download Beeper by Automattic on the App Store. See screenshots, ratings and reviews, user tips, and more games like…
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#2 Usage — Know Everything About Your Mac 
I recently upgraded my Mac from the OG M1 MacBook Pro to the latest M4 Mac Mini. The main reason for the upgrade is that the 8GB RAM on the M1 couldn’t keep up with my workload, so I got the 16GB version of the M4, of course, with a much faster processor.
While I was happy with the Mac Mini’s performance on the surface, the skeptic in me wondered whether the new Mac was actually better than my old one, or if it was just an app I was using that was slowing everything down.
I used to rely on the Activity Monitor app to check how much memory my apps were using, which app was making my processor work the hardest, and similar stats.
But I wanted something more intuitive and visual to check out these stats because the Activity Monitor felt like an app from the early 2000s. So, as I always do, I went to Setapp and browsed around to see if any premium app there would help me, and I came across an app called ‘Usage’ (clearly, the makers didn’t spend more than 2 seconds coming up with that name).
The app had everything I wanted, showing all the essential stats like memory consumption, processor load, and even the battery levels of my Bluetooth devices, in a visual way instead of throwing a bunch of numbers at me.
Source: Screenshot by Author
So, as any normal person would do, I installed the app on both my Macs, opened the same apps and the same number of tabs in Safari, and checked how the performance is between the two. And I was pleased with the results, and my new Mac was certainly more capable than my old one. I should never have doubted the claims of my man Tim Cook, I guess.
Usage - Device Monitor App - App Store
Download Usage - Device Monitor by Oleh Stasula on the App Store. See screenshots, ratings and reviews, user tips, and…
#3 Sound Source — More Than One Sound at a Time sound 
I cannot tell you how many times I was irritated by the Mac’s inability to control sound on a per-app basis.
This is especially annoying when I am listening to music on Apple Music and want to watch a YouTube video at the same time, but without audio, you know, just for reference purposes. Or sometimes I will be in a meeting where people are talking about things I am not interested in, and I would like to watch something else while muting the meeting audio.
But no, macOS refuses to reduce Teams’ volume alone; it just lowers the volume of everything playing through the speakers.
Thankfully, I found an app called Sound Source that lets me do exactly what I want: control the volume of individual apps on my Mac. I mean, we are on macOS 26 now, and it’s too late for Apple to add this functionality as a built-in feature.
Source: Screenshot by Author
Besides letting you control individual app volumes, Sound Source also lets you redirect the audio from specific apps to different audio outputs. For example, you can listen to music on your AirPods while the Teams meeting audio plays on your Mac speakers, and if you play a YouTube video in Chrome, you can redirect it to your HomePod via AirPlay instead.
This also has the added bonus of letting you listen to music on your Mac through AirPods while someone else watches Netflix at the same time, without the audio overlapping.
SoundSource - Superior sound control
Rogue Amoeba is home to fantastic MacOS audio products for consumers and professionals alike. Rogue Amoeba - Strange…
#4 KeyClu — Giving you More Clue About Your App’s Features 
As someone who tries more apps in a week than the average person does in a year, I spend a lot of time figuring out an app’s features and how to use them efficiently. One way to do that is to know about the most relevant options for my use case and try them out.
Typically, this involves me opening every menu item in the app or exploring the app’s settings page. As you can imagine, this is not a smart way to do things, and it takes up more time than you would imagine.
So, I am glad that I discovered this app on a casual scroll on GitHub one day (you know, as one normally does). KeyClu lets you configure a hotkey (the CTRL key in my case) and displays an overlay of all the app’s menu options, along with their shortcuts, when you double-tap or long-press the hotkey.
Source: Screenshot by Author
What I like the most about this is that instead of just showing you the shortcuts and letting you deal with the keyboard, the overlay also lets you interact with the menu options. So, you can directly click on any menu option in the overlay screen to use it in the app.
This app has definitely saved me a lot of time and headache, and if you regularly deal with complex or new apps, you should install KeyClu as well.
Release v0.30.2 · Anze/KeyCluCask
fixed issue with macOS 26 crash #130 improved app focus handling (issue may still occur) #82
#5 Subscription Day — See Where All Your Money is Going 
I was recently doing an audit of all the monthly and yearly subscriptions I was paying for as part of my new year’s resolution to spend less, and I was surprised to see just 23 items, because in my mind the number was in the mid-50s.
Despite that, a quick conversation with a couple of my friends made me realize that 23 is not a normal number, so I set out to find apps that would help me manage my ‘are you kidding?’- level of subscriptions.
Source: Screenshot by Author
I tried out a bunch of apps and while most of them did a decent job at helping me track my subscriptions, and sending alerts when they are due, I was particularly drawn to an app called Subscription day because of its aesthetics and also the way it visually showed how much money I am losing every month, because the pretty graphs made it look less daunting.
I also loved that the app auto-recognizes the most popular subscriptions and adds their logos and categories, giving me less work. I am currently testing the free version, which limits the number of subscriptions you can track to 5, which is nowhere near enough for me. Plus, the pro version is a lifetime purchase, which is one less subscription to worry about, so I will be purchasing it soon.
If you have a subscription addiction (apparently, that’s a thing), then you might as well add one more purchase to your list and get this app. It is undoubtedly a much better and more pleasing way to track your spending than the boring columns-and-rows layout in Google Sheets, which I was using earlier.