Sostieni Andy Bridson

I spent twenty six years managing Mac and Windows estates, most recently running a fleet of more than 6,700 devices with Jamf and Intune. For most of this year I was building Patched, a product to keep the apps on people's Macs up to date without them having to think about it. I stopped the commercial version in November, but the updater itself works well enough that I would rather give it away than shelve it, so it is now a free, open-source Mac app.

Patched checks the apps you already have against their vendors' own update feeds, Homebrew and the App Store. It tells you when something is out of date, and it installs updates for the apps it can handle, but only after verifying the download's checksum, the developer's signature and Apple's notarisation, with a backup kept in case you need to roll back. There is no account, no subscription and no company behind it, just me maintaining it in my spare time.

At the moment releases are ad-hoc signed, which means macOS asks you to approve the app the first time you open it. Coffees go towards an Apple Developer ID, which is $99 a year. That would let me sign and notarise releases properly and switch on the features that need it, such as self-updating and updating apps installed by an administrator. If Patched saves you some time, a coffee is a kind way of saying so, and it is never expected.