by Jason Snell
Bartender has a new owner
Juli Clover of MacRumors reports that venerable Mac utility Bartender has apparently been sold by longtime developer Ben Surtees, and that the new owner recently re-signed the app but otherwise hasn’t notified customers about the change:
The transaction came to light after some Reddit users saw a warning from MacUpdater letting them know that the company behind Bartender had been silently replaced. MacUpdater warned users that updates to the app from version 5.0.52 could be potentially unsafe due to the lack of transparency surrounding the situation.
These things happen—no developer should be chained to their software forever—but it’s odd that (anonymous?) new owners could appear without any communication to existing Bartender customers beyond a note saying a certificate had been changed. It’s Apple’s rules around signing app binaries, and the attention of MacUpdater, that brought this out into the open at all.
A glance around the Bartender website does reveal that while Surtees celebrated 12 years of Bartender in a blog post announcing version 5, posts from 2024 read more like SEO spam, with “key takeaways” summaries at the top, followed by unrelated Mac tips, followed by a pitch for Bartender.
Software companies don’t owe their users complete transparency, and it’s possible that there were extenuating circumstances in the transaction (from either side) that led to the lack of communication. But the inverse is also true: customers don’t owe software companies their loyalty.
Related: Hidden Bar and Ice both seem like straightforward Mac menu bar utilities, and Hidden Bar is even in the Mac App Store.
(Update: A note apparently from original developer Ben Surtees has been posted to the Bartender website, explaining the sale.)