Menubar apps as they exist now haven’t ever really been a consideration for Apple for UX/UI design purposes. For somewhere between the first third and half of OS X’s existence it wasn’t even possible to have persistent third party status bar items without some hackery that made the system think third party apps were first party menu extras.
Even today the API they use is intended primarily for ephemeral status bar items that are present only when the host application is open and visible in the Dock, which is worked around by declaring the host app as a chromeless background app so it can stay open and keep the status item visible without cluttering peoples’ docks.
In short, the OS doesn’t have features for managing third party menubar items because indefinitely persisting third party menubar items don’t really have any place in the larger design. Third party menubar items are intended to be few in number and relevant to one of the user’s current tasks.
I haven’t seen a single Mac user on screen share that doesn’t have too many icons on their bar for me.
I want to see almost none. For all of Apple’s insistence on design and clean, the menu bar and those hideous icons always there was the worst one ever.
I’ve been a Bartender user for over 10 years (I believe 12) and I’m now really fucking sad.
Apple devs as well as application developers— menu bar icons are clearly a neglected corner of the ecosystem in that Apple would prefer that app devs not persist icons in the menu bar at all. But the feature is nonetheless wildly popular as the nearest systray-alike functionality on macOS.
Not really. Even in the case where every single app has a good reason to have a menu bar icon, but you're still left with the fact that macOS doesn't let you manage them.
Or maybe they don't all have a good reason but you don't really have a choice about running them (e.g., on your work computer).
If you are visually impaired, you also likely have greatly reduced space for those icons, especially when undocked. (This issue plagues me personally.) In that case, this is not merely a clutter issue: app icons will simply be truncated from the menu bar, and in some cases that may mean that some functionality is just totally inaccessible to you.
It’s included in the SetApp bundle and a highly rated and recommended app on there. It’s not that niche especially for developers and power users that gravitate towards SetApp subscription.
For me, I was already paying for “clean my Mac” and fantastical which both cost the same or more than a SetApp subscription which includes dozens of additional apps.
It’s partially built into the OS, in that you can move almost every first party icon into the control center (via System Settings). That probably isn’t sufficient for everyone, but it was good enough for my usage that I never bothered installing Bartender on my M2-series MBP.
And yet people will swear blind that Apple apps don't get special treatment. Whether things like this... or the earlier days of Safari where it had access to some APIs around power-saving...
Or the most nefarious, where Apple apps were able to bypass most of the TCP/IP stack tracking and send traffic directly, regardless of any on-device filtering or firewalling, like Little Snitch.
And then they claimed it was only "a temporary measure while they dealt with updating software", but they never did explain why an app like TextEdit would have ever needed a kernel network extension in the first place.
That to me was almost certainly a post-facto attempt at justification when they were caught with their hand in the cookie jar.
But I can't imagine contortions around "yeah, it's an exceptionally simple bundled text editor but trust us, it really needed that network kernel extension."
