How to Move Mac Apps to Your Menu Bar (and Why You Should)

I live in a small, cramped apartment in a big city. For each item I bring into my house, I feel like I need to throw something out to keep clutter from piling up. In some ways, my battle with my MacBook’s limited screen real estate mirrors my space issues at home. As a tech journalist, installing apps is a daily occurrence for me, which means an overcrowded dock or menu bar.

Luckily, I’ve largely solved my menu bar issues on my Mac, but my dock is still an area of concern. It’s full of apps, and even though I’ve moved it around a few times, it still takes up too much space on my 13-inch laptop screen. It’s gotten so bad that I’ve now switched to automatically hiding the dock (under System Settings > Desktop & Dock). There’s just one problem—I still need to be able to access the apps I was keeping on my dock. Luckily, with some tweaking, it’s easy to move apps from my chaotic dock to my organized menu bar. Here’s how.

Adding any app to the Mac’s menu bar

If an app doesn’t offer a menu bar icon (looking at you, Slack!), then by default, macOS doesn’t let you move it there. That’s where Badgeify comes in. It lets you add any app to the Mac’s menu bar, where these apps will act as they would in the dock. You can click their menu bar icons to open them (or navigate to their active window), or right-click their icons to reveal additional features (when available).

Once you’ve installed Badgeify, you need to give it accessibility permissions, although that’s standard for apps that make changes to the menu bar. The app will then directly open to its settings page, with the General tab selected by default. Click the + button in the Icons section to start adding your favorite apps to your menu bar. The free tier lets you add three apps to the menu bar, but there is a trick you can use to add just one more.

To add more apps to your menu bar, you can alternatively group multiple apps in a folder and add that to the menu bar instead. Clicking the folder icon in the menu bar will show the apps inside it in a drop down menu. Unfortunately, the free tier is only limited to one folder, and that folder can only have up to two apps in it. With the two standard app icons you can add in addition to that folder, that gives you four free menu bar apps in total. The paid version, however, lifts these restrictions.

Customizing menu bar icons with Badgeify

If you like what you see with the free tier, you can pay $9 to unlock all features on one Mac or $16 to use the app on up to three Macs. This removes the limits on the number of apps and folders you can add to the menu bar, as well as how many apps a folder can have inside it. It also, delightfully, unlocks some customization options.

Among these features, the most useful one for me is the ability to hide an app from the menu bar when it has no notifications. For instance, if you add Messages to the menu bar, you can keep it hidden until someone messages you. This way, if the app’s icon is there, you know you have a message to read. You can find this feature over at Badgeify settings > Advanced.