macOS 27 (Golden Gate) – experimental build feedback and findings

[diazdesandi]

Hi everyone,

This discussion is for feedback and reports about Thaw on macOS 27.

The main work is tracked in issue #687 (“macOS 27 Compatibility”). If you’re using the experimental builds from there, please comment here with:

• Your setup (macOS 27 build, notable menu bar apps)
• What’s working well
• Any broken features, glitches, or reliability issues
• Relevant logs, screenshots, or short videos

The build is experimental and not officially supported yet. Please don’t open separate issues for macOS 27 bugs for now, keep them in this thread so we can review everything alongside #687.

Thanks for testing Thaw on macOS 27.

[Illustar0]

Thank you for your work. Most features are working properly, and so far I have only encountered two issues.

1. The Thaw icon cannot be repositioned.

2026-06-22.9.15.18.mp4

2. The mouse keeps getting pulled toward the menu bar, accompanied by strange left-and-right movement of the menu bar icons. It feels as if the mouse is dragging the icons around, but in fact I am not doing anything at all. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to record this issue.

[qwertyuiop6]

I also have the first question.

[diazdesandi]

I'll try to address 1 for now, I had issues with Thaw's icon, and I might have locked it in place.

[diazdesandi]

Can you please try the following version? Preview 2.

[serotonincrash]

Hey there, thanks for your work on Thaw! It's awesome and I've been using it daily for quite a bit. Setup is as follows:

• MacBook Pro, M3 Pro, 27.0 beta 26A5353q
• not anything notable? I have boring.notch installed if that influences anything, betterdisplay + buffer for pasteboard

EDIT:
The menubar hiding, alongside the full menubar (when I hover over the correct icon) work great! Some stuff that doesn't work, however:

The mouse keeps getting pulled toward the menu bar, accompanied by strange left-and-right movement of the menu bar icons. It feels as if the mouse is dragging the icons around, but in fact I am not doing anything at all. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to record this issue.

Screen.Recording.2026-06-22.at.9.42.52.PM.mov

I seem to have reproduced this issue, when rearranging icons from the Hidden section to Visible - it seems like Thaw is doing something to rearrange the menu icons at this point? My icons were being placed one by one into the intended spots, it seems (or at least something like that is happening). Similarly, the Layout menu seems to be broken as well, with each of the icons being fragmented/split apart.

Screen.Recording.2026-06-22.at.9.33.52.PM.mov

This is a video showcasing some more broken functionality in the menu bar itself - right now, the app icons don't seem to render properly, and they're slightly offset from where they're supposed to be. Additionally click-to-reveal and hover-to-reveal are both broken, I can only access the rest of the menu bar via clicking on the Thaw icon.

Hope this helps! Let me know if you need more information.

[diazdesandi]

Can you please try the following version? Preview 2.

[serotonincrash]

Installed it! Right now the icon rendering is still not working properly.

The mouse thing still happens occasionally - I'll try to reproduce it on my end soon.

[diazdesandi]

Can you try preview 3?

[serotonincrash]

Hey there! Sorry for being a bit late on this, past few days have been busy. Just updated, did the settings + perms reset and here's some issues:

• it didn't actually reset my prefs... which was weird? I'll try again after this post
• when I hover over the menu bar, the icons show up semi correct-ish, but hovering over the hidden section snaps it to the side

Screen.Recording.2026-07-01.at.1.09.10.PM.mov

• rearranging icons is still rather buggy and don't show up where they're supposed to

Screen.Recording.2026-07-01.at.1.10.08.PM.mov

I'm gonna try clearing the prefs and perms again and try. Will edit in results

edit: I did it again with Thaw closed and it seems to work a lot better! My only report is the already-reported messed up icons.

Worth noting that this only started happening after I adjusted the Thaw button to the front, which presumably did some rearranging.

[serotonincrash]

Screen.Recording.2026-07-01.at.2.13.19.PM.mov

Also noting that unhidden menu icons seem to generally not hide themselves as fast as they used to. I assume this however is a general performance thing.

[promarcel]

At first, thank you so much for the work and effort you put in this early. 🎉

I run into some issues with iStatsMenu and Thaw. I recorded a video for you down below and also logs are attached too!

Screen.Recording.2026-06-22.at.16.00.04.mov

thaw_2026-06-22_16-04-58.log

It seems the redraw of the indicators are going to flickering and don't still in place. Also, the mouse (cursor) seems to go crazy with it too. Move items in the menu bar by command move them seems also tricky or not working probably.

If you need any more details, let me know. Happy to help! 😄

[diazdesandi]

And with the pop-up, the issue also happens?

[promarcel]

Once I enabled the "Thaw Bar" the iStat Menu items are gone. Then come back in the Thaw bar eighter. They are not updated anymore and moving them from "Hidden" to "Visible" shows them in the App but not in the menu bar.

Here is a quick demo about it:

Screen.Recording.2026-06-28.at.17.05.59.mov

[diazdesandi]

Yup, I am focused on the issues with iStat Menu; Stats has no issues so far (I am testing both). At least Thaw can handle iStat items, but they shouldn't be hidden by moving another item to hiding.

[diazdesandi]

I've tried different approaches without success, so I'm going to contact the developer since BetterTouchTool and Bartender seem to have the same issue with iStat.

[diazdesandi]

Update: I emailed the iStat Menus developer 2–3 days ago about this (with a link to this thread and logs). No reply yet, I’ll share any updates here as soon as I get them.

[Xytronix]

This doesn't look properly integrated. All these arrows are mislabeled as applications, it would be great if Thaw can be natively integrated.

Moving items down into the hidden bar doesn't work as well, they just disappear completely. There is no update happenng.
Dragging these native collapse arrows out causes the native functionality to break despite them staying in the visible menubar in Thaw.

[diazdesandi]

So it is interfering with the native hidden. I do not have a MacBook with macOS 27 to test, so if you can try to deactivate the native one to see if the issue stops, or if you can send me logs or anything that could help, it would be of great help.

[aiwaah]

Dear friends,
I installed the latest beta app in macos 27, but hiding is not working. I dont know why.

Even all permissions are given.

Can you help?

[diazdesandi]

Does reset layout / reset to visible hides them?
Also, please try the following version? Preview 2.

[diazdesandi]

Can you try preview 3?

[jakimo]

I'm having trouble finding the new GG Preview releases. Are we now on Preview 3? Where can one grab this release?

[vardecab]

I'm having trouble finding the new GG Preview releases. Are we now on Preview 3? Where can one grab this release?

Hah, I struggled to find it too - check this @jakimo ↓

[diazdesandi]

Preview 4 coming in the next hour or so, release notes are ready, just doing more testing.

[modeezie]

New version here.

I don't want to detract from the conversation but just wanted to say thank you @diazdesandi - you are an absolute beast. Thank you for keeping this patched up for the macOS 27 users. This was really the only app I cared about at all, as my menubar is in disarray since upgrading.

[diazdesandi]

Thanks for the kind words, really appreciate it.

[Xytronix]

There are a variety of issues with this, this is still a relatively broken build.

1. Half the features aren't working as tint etc
2. You can't drag an item out of the bars, it duplicates
3. The small minibar causes the native hidden section to pop in existence briefly for a few seconds
4. Various items are duplicated and icons exist with no clear function
5. Dragging items often times drags them back to where they were before.
6. Overlapping items as seen above and below
7. There appears to be no separation between hidden and visible menubar (whenever the mini menubar opens I see the hidden section in the native menubar.
8. Tooltips inaccurate
9. Create new button doesn't work and I don't want to see it there
10. Dynamic Activities / Icons cause issues with reordering and visibility
11. Reordering animation overlaps the other icon, is slow and often fails

Also would you explain what these two things here are? One is overlapping an icon and these weird icons have no functionality.

Also where is the always hidden section, I am missing it entirely

macOS Developer Beta 2 - macOS 27 Preview 3

[diazdesandi]

Thanks for trying Preview 3 and for collecting all these observations.

Just to restate the context for everyone following along: macOS 27 support is still an experimental preview on top of a developer beta. The priority for us is keeping Thaw 2.x stable on macOS 26; 27 is something I’m exploring in my spare time.

From other testers on the same preview build, the current state is more “mostly working with some duplicated / dynamic item quirks” rather than “relatively broken overall,” which makes me think your environment might have some additional menu bar / Control Center state issues on top of the known preview limitations.

A few quick clarifications:

• The “always hidden” section is intentionally disabled on macOS 27 for now; it’s expected that you don’t see it.
• Tint and basic hiding/showing are working for other people on Preview 3, though there are still known glitches with duplicated captured items and some system arrows / activities.

If you’re up for it, there are a couple of “advanced reset” steps from our frequent issues doc that have helped when Control Center or Thaw’s own state got into a bad place (this will reset some preferences):

1. Quit Thaw, then clear its cache and reset Accessibility:

rm -rf ~/Library/Caches/com.stonerl.Thaw
tccutil reset Accessibility com.stonerl.Thaw

2. Reset Control Center preferences (this can also affect other menu bar managers and Control Center–hosted items):

killall ControlCenter

rm ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.controlcenter.plist
rm ~/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.controlcenter*.plist

After that, reboot, start Thaw again, re‑grant permissions when prompted, and try a minimal setup first (no other menu bar managers, native hidden section disabled) to see whether the behavior is closer to what others are seeing.

Separately, to make this actionable for the remaining issues, it would help a lot if you could share:

• Any other menu bar / notch / display utilities you have installed
• A debug log captured while reproducing one or two specific problems (for example: “drag item X into Hidden → it duplicates,” or “open small minibar → native hidden pops in for a few seconds”).

Given the current state of the APIs and our limited capacity, I won’t be able to go through every single bullet point one by one, but concrete repro steps + logs, especially after a clean state like this, are exactly what help me understand what’s realistically fixable on 27 versus what macOS simply won’t allow right now.

[Xytronix]

Still same behaviour

Even the mini menubar moves randomly, it appears move when moving my mouse over the menubar and crops info from the app toolbar into the mini menubar.

I have droppy, betterdisplay, shottr and thaw. Nothing more
thaw_2026-06-28_16-16-08.txt

[e-squared-de]

Issue 1: opened app, it jumped in position, when dragging icons, they multiply. eventually, it crashed the finder.
https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/f8684364-dd8f-43aa-883d-cbb874d410a3

[diazdesandi]

Did it generate a crash report? Sometimes the menu bar flickers and comes back, which is not istelf a crash Can you try preview 4?

[e-squared-de]

This is the secondary issue where the application itself closed down and restarted, but I cannot use the top bar for any interactions, only when I close it completely. Icons are available, however, the Thaw ice cube jumps in position. Once you do click it and open it, it doesn't react to right or left clicks, and the icons that are usually hidden under Thaw are unresponsive to left or right clicks.
https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/2fa87650-7f17-43aa-b6b7-687a107ecc07

[aomsir]

I can reproduce an issue where clicking the macOS Clock / date-time item opens Thaw Bar instead of Notification Center.

Environment:

• Thaw 2.0.0-rc.1 (47), local build from commit 7f757dda
• macOS 27
• Clock / date-time item is in the visible section
• Thaw Bar is enabled

Behavior:

• With Thaw running, clicking the menu bar date/time opens Thaw Bar.
• Expected behavior: clicking date/time should open Notification Center / widgets.
• If I quit Thaw completely, clicking date/time opens Notification Center normally.

Additional note:

• The Clock / date-time item is not in Hidden or Always Hidden. It is visible in the main menu bar.
• This looks like Thaw Bar click / hover trigger area may be overlapping or intercepting the Clock / system menu bar item area.
• In my screenshot, the Thaw Bar appears directly below the visible menu bar after clicking the date/time item.

[diazdesandi]

Can you try preview 4?

[Xytronix]

Still on preview 4 the same issues.

Also the menubar constantly flashes and moves around when the mini menubar is open.
It looks like regular menubar items are replaced with arrows after first popup.
thaw_2026-07-03_16-12-52.txt
thaw_2026-07-03_13-44-02.txt
thaw_2026-07-03_16-16-19.txt

There is no always hidden section, version 3 was more stable.

Is this AI generated, because this doesn't look tested at all.

[diazdesandi]

Thanks for testing Preview 4 and for attaching fresh logs and screenshots.

To clarify a few concrete things:

• macOS 27 support in Thaw is still an unsupported experimental preview on top of a developer beta. There is currently no menu bar manager that is “fully working” on 27 everyone is dealing with the same new MenuBarAgent / overflow behavior. The only other app that works, has most of it's functionalities stripped down.
• On my own 27 setup, Preview 4 is working well enough that I could just say “it works for me” and move on.
• When you say “still the same issues,” you’re talking about the notch + native hidden/overflow behavior. I have already explained a few times that I cannot test this combination since I don’t have a MacBook running macOS 27, so some of the fixes here are necessarily blind until people on that hardware confirm them.
• The logs you attached are helpful for general crashes and layout failures, but they do not, on their own, tell me if Thaw is handling the overflow chevrons correctly around the notch. For that, I have to rely on testers’ descriptions and screenshots.

On features:

• The Always Hidden section is available in Preview 4. It has to be explicitly enabled in Advanced settings, and it’s off by default by design. That’s been the behavior since version 1.0.0, so “there is no always hidden section” just means it hasn’t been turned on in your configuration, not that it’s missing from the app.

On where this is going:

• There is already a community PR that improves the notch/native‑hidden handling, and the author and I are working together to refine that path. That will likely do more for your setup than any amount of “still broken” comments.

[Mason-Boom]

It may not be my place to comment on this, however @Xytronix, please be more respectful in this discussion thread.

Thaw is certainly not AI-generated and is an open source project where unpaid developers work to create free software for anyone in the world. It is a slap in the face to describe these people's fantastic work as untested AI slop. They do not have to be doing this and most companies don't even offer this level of support for consumer-grade products.

macOS 27 is in a developer beta and should only be used by developers who are accustomed to dealing with a range of issues across their OS and apps. Thaw itself is running as a pre-alpha preview build to support this OS developer beta before its later regular release in the fall with full native support. If you want full native integration right now, I suggest you downgrade to macOS 26 where Thaw (and the OS it is running on) is fully natively supported.

Community bug reports from people like yourself are vital to fixing issues especially on very early betas of an operating system and pre-alpha preview builds of an application. However, developers should be given grace and respect for the time and effort that they put into projects like these in their own free time. Simply saying "Still experiencing the issue, is this app AI?" is not a constructive bug report and does not lead to your issues being solved.

[Xytronix]

@diazdesandi Thanks for working on this.

I am not only speaking about the notch + native hidden/overflow behaviour, every issue I have been mentioning is still existing since preview 1 despite being labelled as fixed in your changelog. I will provide a video to help you once I find an alternative screen recording software. You may consider logging more issues in the future because logging is limited.

@Mason-Boom you may as well understand the background where this is coming from before criticising valid worries.

I am myself an open source contributor and appreciate the diligent work of others to provide free value, especially with many shifting to SaaS. I was one of the first supporters of Ice before its rapid growth in users and do understand that its not affordable for many to maintain open source software.

The reason I am asking this question is because I have been testing these builds since preview 1 and experienced the same issues continously while being offered no real debugging direction to help in creating a patch for these issues. The author is labelling their work as stable enough with major issues fixed and plans to release such a build which is confusing based on my experience.

[Mason-Boom]

I want to say thank you to everyone, especially @diazdesandi, for all your work so far on 27 support!

I just installed Preview 4 and have been able to replicate my setup from 26 nearly identically outside of the Little Snitch menu bar item not being recognized as an item at all. The menu bar is still a bit jumpy and selecting an item from the search menu doesn't pull bring up the item, but outside of that, P4 is noticeably more stable than P3 and nearly useable the same as 26 for me already. If you need more info from me or future testing, I'm happy to help.

[diazdesandi]

Do the menu bar items have this issue in the layout? That's the issue I am trying to fix

[Mason-Boom]

The Thaw Bar does not work at all for me. Even with the setting on, it just puts the icons in my regular menu bar.

However, I do have that visual icon picture issue in my Layout tab that is in that screenshot.

[diazdesandi]

Yes, those are fallbacks, since the icons are now actually hidden and not pushed out of the screen like past APIs. For ThawBar, are you sure you click on the apply button when you activate it? I know it works and should work in setups with a notch, even when the app was broken it worked without displaying anything.

[Mason-Boom]

That's my bad; once I reapplied the template ThawBar is working as expected now.

[diazdesandi]

Regarding Little Snitch:

I just realized that little snitch was updated like two weeks ago, thx for the logs, it might change things now since it seems all the elements are unified under at.obdev.littlesnitch.agent and that might be the reason why it started showing up on the logs. Hopefully this new approach of theirs solves the issues we have.

Originally posted by @diazdesandi in https://github.com/stonerl/Thaw/discussions/737#discussioncomment-17615267

[gregmichael]

Preview 4 (After reseting and starting fresh) on MBP 16" m4 max

Screen.Recording.2026-07-03.at.5.07.58.PM.mov

Other notable not shown in above video:
-Always hidden section never populates

[diazdesandi]

As for the recording, does the issue happen outside the screen capture? The QuickTime icon produces issues when you try to interact with Thaw and it's being recorded. I haven't taken time to solve it since it only happens in such a specific condition vs. more important issues / bugs.

[diazdesandi]

I was able to replicate the issue with Always hidden; just to confirm, when you click on Thaw's icon, Always hidden doesn't show up and there is flickering? And only the hidden show up.

[gregmichael]

Here is a video to answer your first questions. 2nd question, yes the issue happens outside the screen capture (same as screen capture).
thaw.log

Screen.Recording.2026-07-05.at.12.26.37.AM.mov

[gregmichael]

...bit of an update, I am now on MacOS 27 DB3 (was on DB2) I am now getting this result with same settings as previous.

Screen.Recording.2026-07-07.at.3.22.42.PM.mov

[diazdesandi]

I just realized that little snitch was updated like two weeks ago, thx for the logs, it might change things now since it seems all the elements are unified under at.obdev.littlesnitch.agent and that might be the reason why it started showing up on the logs. Hopefully this new approach of theirs solves the issues we have.

[joaofrgomes]

Oh boy. I've just installed Golden Gate PB1 and this preview build 4 is extremely rough. My menu extras will randomly disappear altogether, items will be randomly dragged around as if I was still Command+clicking them even if I'm just moving the mouse cursor, it seems to outright hijack my mouse cursor movement OS-wide (yep, it almost feels as if it was malware or some serious macOS glitch, but I know it's Thaw-related as once I quit it, everything goes back to normal), etc. I can't even test it properly, but maybe I can record my screen and send you some logs.

[joaofrgomes]

@joaofrgomes try the options under Tools > Reset Control Center and Quit & Clear Cache. The issue with the notch is that the native hidden element pollutes the screen capture, nothing else (I think). It should not behave like that at all; it doesn't while I test new versions or even when something is broken on my end, so it's very strange. I run a triple-monitor setup and have never come across that. I believe logs would work for now, to see what's going on.

It absolutely did not work, sorry. Are there any other troubleshooting steps I should try?

As for Golden Gate as a whole, what other options do I have other than nuke the entire thing and start over? I happen to have a lot of custom settings, and quite a bit of personal data (duplicated, of course) that would take me quite a while to recreate, oof. And as I said, I haven't seen this kind of behaviour with any other app. And I'm perfectly comfortable with more esoteric solutions, such as running betas of apps like, say, Onyx and clear up more system-level stuff…

[joaofrgomes]

As for my logs, here they are:
Logs.zip
And here's my little screen recording: https://youtu.be/kgx8a3sFw1c

[diazdesandi]

Oh no, I mean, clean install of apps, not the OS itself, it seems that the behaviors from macOS 26 for installs changed or maybe its a bug, nope, no need to reinstall macOS 😅

[diazdesandi]

I am preparing a build, it might be slightly buggy with unrelated things (like the grouping) but it should stop all the malware like behavior

[joaofrgomes]

Oh, cool! So… Just a complete refresh of my install should work, hopefully? Where can I find all of Thaw's ancillary files, ~/Preferences and ~/Application Support, or is there other places I should look in?

[Spoekenkieker]

It seems there may be a usable API?
See discussion for BTT: https://community.folivora.ai/t/macos-27-golden-gate-menu-bar-management-broken-solutions-ice-thaw-bartender-barbee-etc/47232

[diazdesandi]

I don't understand? Thaw already hides items and works, we are just fine tuning. Work under #687

[Spoekenkieker]

Ah, good, I’m not a coder and posted this just in case it wasn’t known.

[Sowyu]

macOS 27 menu-bar hiding

I've built a small proof of concept that can hide menu-bar items on macOS 27 Public Betas 1 (26A5378n) and 2.

It dynamically loads:

/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/MenuBarClientCore.framework/MenuBarClientCore

The relevant private API is:

MBAssessmentModeConfiguration
-initWithAllowedSystemItems:allowedBundleIdentifiers:

MBAssessmentModeAssertion
-activateWithConfiguration:completionHandler:
-invalidate

I use Accessibility to read menu-bar item frames and bundle identifiers. Bundles positioned left of a divider are excluded from the allowlist. System item IDs 0...8 and right-side bundle identifiers are allowed.

The assertion must remain strongly retained. Invalidating it restores the hidden items.

This works, but there are a few bugs here and there. So I'm here to tell some smarter people.

The API operates at bundle level, so individual icons belonging to the same application cannot be treated separately.

[diazdesandi]

Hi! Thanks for the contribution, that's what we already use, work is being tracked under #687.

[Sowyu]

oh my bad should have checked :p

[IamWJC]

Preview 5 seems to be the most stable version for me. The only outstanding issue is that the focus icon STILL isn't showing for me.

Here is a screenshot showing that my System Settings have it on, and set to "Always Show", and if I quit thaw, it does show up. But with Thaw on the Focus menu icon is gone, and doesn't show in any of the sections, so I can't make it show. Along with both log files from today

thaw_2026-07-27_12-03-05.log
thaw_2026-07-27_12-16-02.log

[diazdesandi]

Yup, that seems a limitation of the hiding system, we'll try to find a workaround for it.

[celarye]

The layout is all over the place for me, constantly shifting around by itself, it's basically impossible to put them where I want. You can check the below videos:

1.mov

2.mov

3.mov

This video was also the first time it let me drag something into the hidden section.

[diazdesandi]

Go to Tools > Reset Control Center and later Clear Cache and Quit Thaw.
New build to test here
https://github.com/thaw-app/Thaw/actions/runs/30550889534/artifacts/8762877876

[celarye]

I’ll give this a try, thanks!

[seattle-grizzly-coder]

Same issue here. Random gaps that appear in multiple places and the hidden bar doesn't stay open.

thaw-clip.mov

[diazdesandi]

Do you have interactive icons? If so, that was recently addressed on a PR, here:

https://github.com/thaw-app/Thaw/actions/runs/30550889534/artifacts/8762877876

[rufo]

I'm having a lot of fairly random-feeling behavior on Golden Gate developer beta 4. When trying to use the layout tools, Thaw's attempts to capture items' actual icons fail pretty hard for me, capturing other icons and/or the desktop background. In addition, I can't for the life of me get my iStat Menus gauges to appear in the actual menu bar if I perform any rearranging from Reset Layout > Visible. I'm using the latest preview build linked in this thread (marked as preview 6) and have tried resetting Control Center and Thaw's cache. Below is a video of the behavior I see in Thaw's layout utility, and I've attached a log file - sadly the log from when I took the video, but it's exhibiting similar behavior, so hopefully it's still useful - if not let me know and I'll re-record and grab logs at the same time.

thaw_2026-07-30_15-41-05.log

Screen.Recording.2026-07-30.at.3.34.11.PM.mov

[diazdesandi]

The issues from iStats are upstream. We cannot do something, there is no hiding individual items so far per OS limitation

[rufo]

Gotcha - I also maybe had similar problems with SwiftBar, so I tried quitting that out first (as it's less important to me), but I didn't check iStat Menus. I'm sure that'll frustrate some people, but I'm personally fine if all the iStat Menus items are in the permanently Visible section menu bar or handled as a group; it's a bunch of the other items I like to hide. Not if the issues with iStat Menus extend to making everything flaky, though 😅

I will say that I turned off iStat Menus' items - though did not fully uninstall it - and things seemed slightly more stable, but not by much; still a fair amount of desktop background pop-in and icon duplication. I took another recording and log run, and this time while I forgot to start recording at the beginning of my playing with it, they did at least mostly overlap 😆

thaw_2026-07-30_18-56-14.log

Screen.Recording.2026-07-30.at.6.56.39.PM.mov

[diazdesandi]

The idea we have so far is to have some kind of overlay, but we are still thinking about it since we hide "natively" without using tricks and a overlay would mean that we need to display a bar over the menu bar. Btw:

#687 (comment)