About
What ShortcutDock is
A menu bar app launcher for macOS. This page covers what it does, how it is built, and the reasoning behind the parts that are deliberately missing.
What it commits to
Three things that will not change
Native speed
Written in Swift for macOS rather than wrapped in a browser engine. The grid opens straight away and the app holds under 20MB of RAM while idle.
Offline by design
The Mac app needs no account and no connection. It does not track the apps you launch or send anything off your machine.
Paid once, if at all
The free tier is a working launcher, not a trial that expires. Removing its limits costs a single payment and nothing renews.
The idea
The macOS Dock holds a strip of screen permanently and asks for a precise mouse movement onto a small target. Launchpad takes over the whole display to answer a question that lasts a second. Spotlight is fast, but it is typing rather than looking, so it only helps when you already know the name of the app you want.
ShortcutDock takes the remaining option: a visible grid of every installed app, one click or one keystroke away, that closes again the moment something launches. It sits in the menu bar, which is space macOS already spends, so it costs no additional room on screen. If the Dock is no longer doing anything useful, it can be hidden and ShortcutDock used on its own.
How it is built
It is a native macOS application written in Swift, not a web view in a wrapper. That is the reason the panel opens without a loading state and the reason it uses under 20MB of RAM while sitting idle in the menu bar. It runs on Apple Silicon and Intel Macs and requires macOS 13 Ventura or later.
The app has no account system and no network requirement. Every app it lists is discovered from your own Applications folder on first run, so there is nothing to configure before it is useful.
Privacy, and where the line falls
The Mac app runs entirely offline. It does not track which apps you launch, it collects no analytics, it sends nothing from your Mac, and there is no data about you for anyone to sell. It does not need a network connection to do its job.
This website is a separate matter and it would be dishonest to make the same claim for it. In production the site loads Google Analytics and records download events, including the IP address the request came from. What is collected, why, and how long it is kept is set out in the privacy policy.
Independent and narrow in scope
ShortcutDock is not funded by advertising and not sold as a subscription, so nothing about it depends on holding your attention or on shipping features to justify a recurring charge. It launches apps. Development effort goes into doing that faster rather than into expanding the surface area.
What has been added since the first release came out of user requests: groups of apps that open together, a global keyboard shortcut you choose yourself, a favourites bar, and search for people with a lot of apps installed. The features page lists everything currently shipped.
Questions
Something here not answered?
The FAQ covers installation, system requirements and what the free tier includes. Anything else can go straight to the contact form.