A small native macOS 13+ menu-bar app for a Bluetooth keyboard, mouse, speaker, and headphones. Each selected device has its own icon and connection state. The app has no Dock icon, daemon, network service, or reconnect action.
These illustrative images use generic device names.
Download the latest macOS arm64 DMG or ZIP from Releases. The app requires macOS 13 or newer and Apple Silicon. Copy BluetoothStatus.app to /Applications before enabling Launch at Login.
Click any Bluetooth Status icon in the menu bar to see the selected device name and status, open Settings, toggle Launch at Login, or quit. Device names and status text remain readable in the dark menu.
Click a connected icon to see the device's battery percentage in its menu when macOS reports it. Devices without a readable battery percentage show no battery row.
In Settings, assign paired devices by Bluetooth address rather than by a name guess. Speaker and Headphones have separate pickers and icons. Connected audio devices appear automatically: both icons show when both are connected, and each disappears when its device disconnects. You can override visibility and disconnection behavior per device. Keyboard and mouse remain visible by default. Open Bluetooth Status from Applications or Spotlight to show Settings, even if macOS hides its menu-bar icons. Settings also has a Quit button. Assignments remain saved when an icon is hidden or its device is removed; the icon returns if that address reconnects. If re-pairing gives the device a new address, select it again. One icon family and one status style apply to all four devices.
| Status style | Connected | Disconnected | Unavailable |
|---|---|---|---|
| Outline / Fill | filled | outlined | gray |
| Monochrome Squares | white filled rounded square | hollow rounded square | gray |
| Red / Green | green | red | gray |
Icon families are SF Symbols, Solid, Outline, and Rounded. The selected app-icon artwork is in Design/AppIcon.
The app reads paired-device state at startup, reacts to Bluetooth connection events, rescans after wake, and reconciles every 30 seconds. HID and Core Audio changes can also trigger a scan. A process-held lock prevents a second instance from starting, even when the executable is launched directly.
Measured on September 27, 2026, using the installed Release app on an Apple silicon MacBook Air with 16 GiB RAM and macOS 27.0, with Settings open. Over 90 seconds, CPU averaged 0.04% of one core and peaked at 1% in a sampled one-second interval. Physical memory footprint was 40–43 MiB; RSS stayed near 119 MiB, including shared mappings. A manual device refresh used 0.06 CPU seconds over 12 seconds. One separate system_profiler SPBluetoothDataType -json run took 0.05 seconds and peaked at 6.3 MiB RSS.
These are observations from one Mac, not a startup benchmark or a long-term memory-leak test.
Requirements: macOS 13 or newer, Xcode with the macOS SDK. Open BluetoothStatus.xcodeproj in Xcode, or use:
xcodebuild test -project BluetoothStatus.xcodeproj -scheme BluetoothStatus \
-destination 'platform=macOS,arch=arm64' CODE_SIGNING_ALLOWED=NO
xcodebuild build -project BluetoothStatus.xcodeproj -scheme BluetoothStatus \
-configuration Release -destination 'platform=macOS,arch=arm64' \
-derivedDataPath ./DerivedData CODE_SIGNING_ALLOWED=NOproject.yml is the XcodeGen source of truth. After adding or removing source files, run xcodegen generate --spec project.yml and commit the generated BluetoothStatus.xcodeproj.
Run ./scripts/package.sh to build an arm64 Release app and create a ZIP, DMG, and SHA-256 checksums under a new dist/BluetoothStatus-<version>-* directory. The script verifies the app signature, architecture, menu-bar setting, ZIP, and DMG. These packages are ad-hoc signed local previews; public distribution needs Developer ID signing and notarization.
For a local installation, quit any running copy before replacing it:
ditto ./DerivedData/Build/Products/Release/BluetoothStatus.app /Applications/BluetoothStatus.app
codesign --force --deep --sign - /Applications/BluetoothStatus.app
open -a /Applications/BluetoothStatus.appThe dist/ directory is an untracked local build artifact, not part of this repository. The command above creates an ad-hoc signed local app; distribution outside your own Mac requires appropriate Developer ID signing and notarization. Install in /Applications before enabling Launch at Login. macOS may require approval in System Settings → Login Items.
BluetoothStatus/Bluetooth/: local Bluetooth snapshot and event triggers.BluetoothStatus/StatusBar/: independent menu-bar items and icon rendering.BluetoothStatus/Settings/: device selection, visibility, styles, and preferences.BluetoothStatus/Services/: launch-at-login and single-instance support.BluetoothStatusTests/: state, icon, parser, preference, and singleton tests.Design/: menu icon option boards and selected app-icon source.
No device identifiers or connection history are sent to a server. Preferences are stored locally in macOS UserDefaults.