LockinRa for macOS — Download for Apple Silicon & Intel

Download

v1.7.0 · arm64 260 MB · x64 262 MB · not notarized — see below

Not sure which? Apple menu → About This Mac. "Apple M1/M2/M3/M4" means Apple silicon; "Intel" means the other one.

Read this before you open it

This build is not notarized by Apple, so Gatekeeper will refuse it on the first try — you will see "LockinRa can't be opened because Apple cannot check it for malicious software." That is expected, and it is about a certificate we do not have yet, not about the app.

To open it: drag LockinRa to Applications, then right-click the app → Open, and confirm once. macOS remembers the decision.

If macOS instead says the app is damaged, the download was quarantined. Clear it:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/LockinRa.app

Notarization needs a paid Apple Developer ID. Until there is one, this is the honest trade: a working build with one extra click, rather than no Mac build at all.

What "supported" had to mean first

Porting an Electron app to macOS is mostly free, which is exactly why bad Mac ports are common: the app runs, so it looks finished. The parts that are not free are the ones that touch the operating system directly — and each of these was a real defect, not a missing nicety.

Fixed for the Mac build

⌘C, ⌘V, ⌘X, ⌘Z, ⌘A and ⌘Q. macOS reads keyboard equivalents from the menu bar. LockinRa had removed its application menu — correct on Windows, and on a Mac it means you cannot copy or paste anywhere in the app, including its own text fields.
Launching your apps. A .app is a folder, not an executable. Workspaces now hand it to LaunchServices, which is also what gives the app its Dock entry and its environment.
Finding your apps. The workspace picker reads your Applications folders instead of returning an empty list.
Run at login starts LockinRa hidden in the menu bar, rather than throwing a dashboard at you on every boot.
Now playing in the focus mini-player reads Music and Spotify — and never launches a player just to ask it a question.
Local AI finds Ollama wherever you installed it: the app bundle, Homebrew on either architecture, or a manual install.

Known limits

Window titles need Screen Recording permission. macOS treats another app's window title as screen content. Without it LockinRa still sees which app you are in, so app-level focus detection works and title-aware detection does not. It is asked for once, and refusing it degrades the feature rather than breaking the app.
The menu-bar icon is a colour tile, not a monochrome glyph. A template icon keeps only the silhouette, and the LockinRa mark is a filled square — it would render as a black block.
Gatekeeper asks once, because the build is not notarized yet — right-click → Open, and macOS remembers. See above.
No auto-update yet. The .zip that makes updates possible ships from v1.7.0 onward, so the next version is the first that can update itself.

Signing and notarization

The build is ad-hoc signed and not notarized. Ad-hoc signing is what lets it run at all: macOS refuses to execute an unsigned arm64 binary outright, so without it an Apple silicon Mac would report the app as damaged rather than merely untrusted. Notarization is the separate step that would stop Gatekeeper asking, and it requires a paid Apple Developer ID.

The pipeline is already wired for a Developer ID identity and Apple's notary service, with the hardened runtime on. That last part is not a formality: the hardened runtime blocks the just-in-time compilation that both the browser engine and the on-device speech runtime depend on, so the app declares exactly the exceptions it needs — JIT, the microphone, and permission to ask Music and Spotify what is playing. Nothing broader.

When a certificate exists, the same build comes out signed and notarized and the extra click disappears. Nothing else about the app changes.

System requirements

macOS 11 Big Sur or newer, on Apple silicon or Intel.
8 GB RAM for small local models, 16 GB recommended for larger ones.
Roughly 254 MB installed — the local models are most of it.

Windows has an installer, an .msi and a Microsoft Store build. Linux has an AppImage, a deb and an rpm on the Linux page. Every file for every platform, with SHA-256 checksums, is on the downloads page.

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