A tiny macOS menu-bar app that watches the status pages you care about and tells you the moment something breaks — before your users do.
Downbar lives in the menu bar as a small health meter. Pick the services you depend on from a curated catalog of 110+ across 12 categories (or paste any status page URL), and Downbar polls them quietly in the background. When something goes down or recovers, you get a native notification. No dashboard to keep open, no account to create, no data leaving your Mac except the checks themselves.
- Menu-bar health meter — a colored bar-meter icon shows the worst status across everything you monitor at a glance: green (operational), yellow (degraded), orange (partial outage), red (major outage), gray (unreachable).
- 110+ curated services, 12 categories — Developer Tools, Cloud & Infra, Data & Backend, Communication, Productivity, Observability & APM, Payments, Hosting, Identity & Auth, AI APIs, and more. Pick per-service or "Select all" per category.
- Add any status page — paste a Statuspage.io, Instatus, or plain website URL and Downbar monitors it too.
- Watch only the components you care about — on any Statuspage.io service, pick specific components (e.g. the Cloudflare data center your users hit) and Downbar ignores outages everywhere else on that page.
- Native notifications on down and recovery, with transient-blip de-flapping so a momentary unreachable reading doesn't spam alerts.
- Multiple status formats — Statuspage.io, Instatus, plain website reach ability, and first-party feeds for AWS, Apple, Google Cloud, and Azure.
- Adjustable poll interval (default 5 minutes).
- Launch at login (sandbox-safe
SMAppService). - Zero data collection — see PRIVACY.md.
| Services | General |
|---|---|
 |
 |
Downbar is a MenuBarExtra SwiftUI app (LSUIElement — no Dock icon, no main
window). A single StatusMonitor owns the service list and the poll timer, and
on each tick fetches every monitored service concurrently.
Each service declares a provider — the status-page format it exposes — and the monitor dispatches to the matching adapter:
| Provider | What it reads |
|---|---|
statuspage |
Statuspage.io summary.json (status.indicator) |
instatus |
Instatus summary.json |
website |
Plain HTTPS reachability of a site/server |
aws |
AWS Health status feed |
apple |
Apple System Status |
gcp |
Google Cloud status |
azure |
Azure status |
Every provider normalizes its result into a shared Indicator enum
(none → minor → major → critical, plus unknown for fetch/parse
failures). The menu-bar icon shows the aggregate — the worst real indicator
across all services — and an unknown reading never masks a genuine outage.
All requests are direct outbound HTTPS to the public status endpoints you choose. There is no backend, no proxy, and no telemetry.
Requires macOS 14+ and a Swift 6 toolchain.
swift build # debug build of the SPM executable
swift test # run the test suiteTo produce a runnable, LSUIElement .app bundle (release build, ad-hoc
signed):
scripts/build-app.sh
open Downbar.appPackage.swift is the source of truth for the code. The App Store build wraps
this same target in an Xcode archive target for submission.
The code is MIT-licensed — see LICENSE. The "Downbar" name and the app icon are not covered by the license and remain © Nathan Tarasiuk.