About MacGrove
MacGrove is a small, hand-checked collection of Mac apps: the ones worth keeping in your Dock. One person keeps it, nobody can pay to be in it, and nothing here needs an account to read.
Why this exists
I built MacGrove because I could not find the apps I needed. When I got my first Mac, I went looking for the small tools that solve one specific annoyance, searched every corner of the internet, and kept landing on the same lists of the same twenty apps.
Lists like this are nothing new, and that was never where the difficulty was. Finding the one indie app that fixes your problem is. That is the whole job here: search, discover, and suggest.
How apps get here
New candidates are found with AI, which searches the web and reads what it finds. Otherwise the list would stop at the apps I already happened to know about. Nothing is published on that basis alone: every app is opened and checked by hand first.
Developers can submit their own app to be seen by more people, and anyone who has actually used one can rate it. That is what decides whether an app is any good: the people using it, not the pitch.
A listed app can carry a “Featured on MacGrove” badge on its own site — the snippet is on its page. When the badge is seen loading there, the listing marks itself as linked back.
What a listing tells you
Price is stated plainly: free, freemium, or paid, and whether the paid part is a one-time purchase or a subscription, plus whether the app sells anything from inside itself. Open source is shown as its license next to the repository, with an install command where there is one.
An app that is no longer maintained says so, and points at what to use instead, rather than quietly rotting at the bottom of a list.
How the order works
Top picks are chosen by hand. The rest of the list is ordered automatically, and you can re-sort it yourself by newest, name, or rating. A rating is one anonymous vote from one to five stars: no name attached, nothing to sign up for.
An app needs at least five votes before its average counts for anything. One enthusiastic vote should not outrank an app with a track record.
Nobody can buy a place
There is no sponsored listing, no paid Top pick, no affiliate link dressed up as a recommendation. The tip jar is the only money involved, and it buys coffee rather than placement.
What it knows about your visit
Visits are counted without cookies. Google Analytics loads only if you allow it, and the footer's “Analytics choices” link turns it off again. The one cookie the site writes for itself is your light or dark choice, and only once you pick one: until then the page follows your Mac's appearance.
Who keeps it
I build Mac apps and keep this list in the gaps between them. Suggestions are the point of the Submit page: the catalog is only as good as what people point it at.
