The notch hiding menubar icons is such a stupid problem to have. I waste hours every week trying to help people who send me frustrated emails because they bought one of my apps and they say: "it doesn't launch" or "why doesn't it have any interface??"
No amount of FAQ will help these people. And this also results in hasty refund requests and even worse, chargebacks that take 2x the amount the users paid out of my pocket.
I recently helped my brother launch a simple app for making any window a PiP window (https://lowtechguys.com/pipiri) and in the first two days, half of the sales turned into refunds exactly because of this issue. People had so many menubar icons that they thought the app just doesn't work. Not an encouraging launch for his first app.
Not to mention the fact that the best solution that helped alleviate this, the Bartender app, was completely broken by Apple's internal API changes in macOS Tahoe.
The reason things are this way is that in Apple’s view, third party devs are effectively misusing menu items.
Originally it wasn’t even possible for third parties to add new menu extras using public APIs. That was something reserved for Apple. Third party devs had to use a tool called MenuCracker.
When Apple finally added the API used now, the intention for it was for full fat GUI programs to provide ephemeral menu item companions that disappear when the host app is quit. It was never intended to facilitate persistent third party menu extras.
So the issue hasn’t been fixed because in Apple’s view it’s a problem of third party devs’ own creation. If all third party menu items were ephemeral nobody would have enough for them to overflow into the notch area.
——
Personally I think they should offer a way to extend the Control Center and push devs who want persistence towards that. That would afford better organization for users and allow them to better control which are immediately visible (since some apps don’t offer an option to hide their menu item).
It's such a simple problem to solve too: when there are too many menu bar icons, put them in an overflow menu. A single icon which contains a list of icons. And let me arrange which icons go into the top bar and which go into the overflow menu.
Windows solved this many many decades ago with their system tray overflow menu. Browsers solved it too, by letting you put extension icons in an overflow menu. It's not hard.
But nooo, macOS just silently hides applications from you, with no visible indication that there's anything hidden.
It's true this is a mess, but no application should have a menu by icon as its only means of access. It's OK to offer that as an option, but all applications should be capable of presenting a user interface when launched from the Applications directory (or (rarely) ~/Applications, etc).
There's really no exception to this rule. For an (tiny) minority of applications, it makes sense to hide the dock icon, and to typically access the app via hotkey or menu bar widget. But those apps should still have an icon and should still be able to be invoked by opening it using any of the standard ways to do that. That's just how the Mac works.
I never understood the logic behind the thinking there. Why would you ever want to place menubar items UNDER the notch, if you know it's there and they won't be visible?
It's such an easy problem to fix, with such incredible usability consequences, I just don't get the thinking.
The truth is most apps have no business having a menubar icon, but many of them cannot even be disabled out of the box. There's a number of third-party tools that help with the issue, but really this should be handled at the OS level. I want a permission similar to notifications to control whether an app can litter the menubar or not.
Every time I get a new Mac, I run these commands to reduce the spacing between menu bar icons. Lets you fit at least 2x the number of items in the menu bar.
> Apple could certainly make some changes to prevent this being an issue at all.
Why Apple still hasn't fixed this in 2026 baffles me. The fact that a company the size of Tailscale has to find workarounds for an Apple blunder like this speaks volumes about how terrible Apple's software management is.
This seems like a good place to ask: What is the current state of the art for connecting back to my home network while remote? I want:
access to my home server
ability to stream US TV when abroad (by exiting from my home network)
ability to make it easy for others with non-tech backgrounds to connect with their devices (parents, kids, etc)
ability to have remote linux servers connect automatically on boot. This one is because I can't get OTA TV at home and want to set up a simple streaming box at someone else's house to do it that connects back to my house, so we can stream off all of our devices.
I'm guessing tailscale will be a part of this setup which is why I ask here.
I haven't had enough menu bar icons to run into this but is it really the case that the notch just hides whatever icons happen to be behind it? Like, the OS doesn't handle this incredibly obvious edge case? Why not just put an overflow dropdown next to the notch (something Windows XP managed to figure out 25 years ago)? I know software quality has been going down in recent versions of macOS but this is absurd.
I stumbled across TailScale while I asked ClaudeAI regarding switching off of VPN: I wasnt aware of the tool.
Im "shocked" how perfect it functions! It worked out of the box for a fairly simple but old windows setup where I could apply it: Everything was perfectly fine, super user friendly in the beginning.
Actually one of the tools that you could use to admin your mum & dad computer
The "apps" that appear in the menu bar are called Menu Bar Extras. They are supposed to be an optional UI to provide quick access to functions of regular applications that are not running in the foreground.
They aren't supposed to be the entire app or the only way to interact with something.
> We’re working on a comparable UI for Windows devices
As a Linux user and fan of good GUI apps, it always bums me out I'm stuck with the CLI-only options for apps like Tailscale. Even for a simple tray icon I have to resort to buggy GNOME extensions.
I understand the fragmented ecosystem and small user-base on the desktop Linux side make it hard to justify, but I hope that changes one day!
Ironically, I have trouble with Tailscale and Mac SSO. I setup my tailnet with Apple SSO and when I want to connect on my non Windows device there is not an easy way to add a new user and the new user has their own tailnet. I wish I could just use tailscale with a passkey without using third party sso.
Isn't it true that Apple just prefers apps not use the menu bar in the first place? I'm not sure where I had read that, but it might explain why Apple doesn't improve the menu bar. Personally I'm of the opinion that they should improve it because the current situation is untenable.
This feels like one of those bugs that sounds niche until you put a work Mac through the usual gauntlet of VPN, MDM, chat, calendar, backup, and whatever else corp IT adds. Not catastrophic, but it is kind of wild that macOS still has no first party overflow affordance for menu bar icons.
“We don’t have any control over where things get rendered in the menu bar,” said one Tailscale engineer, who asked to go nameless so as to share their honest opinion. “You just say, ‘I want to be a menu bar app.’ They shove it up there, and that’s it, you end up where you end up.”
> said one Tailscale engineer, who asked to go nameless
Fear in a free society? There’s no contradiction here. A free society doesn't create a fearless society. Because freedom is the freedom to amass property. If you are not in that class of capital owners your fear is justified. Class society.
I love Tailscale so much and when I got added to what may have been an A/B test for the windowed app, I was even happier with it. It's a great improvement.
Apple should let users double the menu bar height. Put the app menus, user name, current time and search along the bottom. A text only bar would look coherent.
Then put menu bar items on the row above. Default from right, but let users move items to the left.
I use hiding menu bar and dock. Dynamic Wallpaper toggles desktop files/widgets visibility. So my Mac's resting face is, and would remain, completely uncluttered.
I don't see what this has to do with the notch. There's limited space in the menu bar. The overflow is hidden with or without the notch.
It is a bit weird that Apple hasn't provided a simple UI indicator that some icons are hidden. All that's needed is a dot with a tooltip that opens the settings to configure the menu icons.
I always change my screen resolution to avoid the notch on my Mac. It's non-obvious how to do this but you end up with a slightly shorter resolution than the default.
I know this means I'm wasting potential pixels, and wasting all the engineer effort that went into the nearly bezel-free design, but worth it IMHO.
I really dislike how apps add themselves to the menubar. And I hate if there's no option to remove it from the menubar. Icons with indicators like WiFi, Battery, etc. make sense. But if an app does not need an indicator like that, just add the capabilities to the Dock icon!
Moving from a menu bar app to a proper window is a bold call. Menu bar was convenient for "set it and forget it" but terrible for anything beyond toggling on/off. Curious if they'll keep the menu bar icon as a quick shortcut or kill it entirely.
I’ve been using Bartender (paid) and Thaw (free) to manage my menu bar. Recently, both apps have become quite buggy. I’m not sure whether this is due to macOS or if there are better alternatives I’m not aware of.
Back in the Mac OS X public beta days (and maybe even into 10.0–10.1?), apps that are nowadays shoved into the menu at used to live in the Dock. I kinda think I prefer that.
My only workaround with the stupid notch is to connect it to an external screen which is wider than my 16inch macbook pro so that I can access those apps
I personally found it confusing and un-Mac-like that quitting the configuration app also now stops the Tailscale service. It was unfortunate to discover this while I was AFK.
My recommendation is to rethink it to work like apps like 1Password, Default Folder, Keyboard Maestro, Ice, etc., where I can always easily open a configuration app, but the service must be intentionally/knowingly quit via either the configuration app or the menu bar utility.
TLDR: Please separate the service from the new configuration app.
It is an app that sits in the background and provides connectivity. Occasionally you need to change a setting. Absolutely nobody wants a rich windowed UI, or a menu bar widget that drops down a complex detail card.
I hope they can see this is exactly what killed desktop anti-virus: something that was supposed to be quietly doing its job in the background started getting in the users way. It needed to poke its head up and scream "hey remember me?" at the behest of some product managers or growth hackers. Eventually it got so bad Microsoft just baked it into the OS. Tailscale is on even worse footing here because Apple is even quicker to act when you destroy user experience.
310 comments
No amount of FAQ will help these people. And this also results in hasty refund requests and even worse, chargebacks that take 2x the amount the users paid out of my pocket.
I recently helped my brother launch a simple app for making any window a PiP window (https://lowtechguys.com/pipiri) and in the first two days, half of the sales turned into refunds exactly because of this issue. People had so many menubar icons that they thought the app just doesn't work. Not an encouraging launch for his first app.
Not to mention the fact that the best solution that helped alleviate this, the Bartender app, was completely broken by Apple's internal API changes in macOS Tahoe.
This could have been handled better.
Originally it wasn’t even possible for third parties to add new menu extras using public APIs. That was something reserved for Apple. Third party devs had to use a tool called MenuCracker.
When Apple finally added the API used now, the intention for it was for full fat GUI programs to provide ephemeral menu item companions that disappear when the host app is quit. It was never intended to facilitate persistent third party menu extras.
So the issue hasn’t been fixed because in Apple’s view it’s a problem of third party devs’ own creation. If all third party menu items were ephemeral nobody would have enough for them to overflow into the notch area.
——
Personally I think they should offer a way to extend the Control Center and push devs who want persistence towards that. That would afford better organization for users and allow them to better control which are immediately visible (since some apps don’t offer an option to hide their menu item).
Windows solved this many many decades ago with their system tray overflow menu. Browsers solved it too, by letting you put extension icons in an overflow menu. It's not hard.
But nooo, macOS just silently hides applications from you, with no visible indication that there's anything hidden.
There's really no exception to this rule. For an (tiny) minority of applications, it makes sense to hide the dock icon, and to typically access the app via hotkey or menu bar widget. But those apps should still have an icon and should still be able to be invoked by opening it using any of the standard ways to do that. That's just how the Mac works.
It's such an easy problem to fix, with such incredible usability consequences, I just don't get the thinking.
``
defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain NSStatusItemSpacing -int 2
defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain NSStatusItemSelectionPadding -int 2
> Apple could certainly make some changes to prevent this being an issue at all.
Why Apple still hasn't fixed this in 2026 baffles me. The fact that a company the size of Tailscale has to find workarounds for an Apple blunder like this speaks volumes about how terrible Apple's software management is.
access to my home server
ability to stream US TV when abroad (by exiting from my home network)
ability to make it easy for others with non-tech backgrounds to connect with their devices (parents, kids, etc)
ability to have remote linux servers connect automatically on boot. This one is because I can't get OTA TV at home and want to set up a simple streaming box at someone else's house to do it that connects back to my house, so we can stream off all of our devices.
I'm guessing tailscale will be a part of this setup which is why I ask here.
Im "shocked" how perfect it functions! It worked out of the box for a fairly simple but old windows setup where I could apply it: Everything was perfectly fine, super user friendly in the beginning.
Actually one of the tools that you could use to admin your mum & dad computer
They aren't supposed to be the entire app or the only way to interact with something.
> We’re working on a comparable UI for Windows devices
As a Linux user and fan of good GUI apps, it always bums me out I'm stuck with the CLI-only options for apps like Tailscale. Even for a simple tray icon I have to resort to buggy GNOME extensions.
I understand the fragmented ecosystem and small user-base on the desktop Linux side make it hard to justify, but I hope that changes one day!
But am I misremembering this?
> said one Tailscale engineer, who asked to go nameless
Fear in a free society? There’s no contradiction here. A free society doesn't create a fearless society. Because freedom is the freedom to amass property. If you are not in that class of capital owners your fear is justified. Class society.
Apple should let users double the menu bar height. Put the app menus, user name, current time and search along the bottom. A text only bar would look coherent.
Then put menu bar items on the row above. Default from right, but let users move items to the left.
I use hiding menu bar and dock. Dynamic Wallpaper toggles desktop files/widgets visibility. So my Mac's resting face is, and would remain, completely uncluttered.
> no options to rearrange the menu bar items
This, at least, is not correct. Hold down Command and drag an icon to rearrange the order.
It is a bit weird that Apple hasn't provided a simple UI indicator that some icons are hidden. All that's needed is a dot with a tooltip that opens the settings to configure the menu icons.
I know this means I'm wasting potential pixels, and wasting all the engineer effort that went into the nearly bezel-free design, but worth it IMHO.
Nowadays, that whole header should probably leave in the sidebar itself, and the sidebar could probably be more "Liquid Glass"-like.
> Apple, a company that traditionally favors simple functionality
but not being able to interact with an icon is DISfunctionality, though yes, a simple one. So that principle can't explain the bad design either.
I guess I'll find out soon enough once I update, but I didn't see any specific callout in the article.
Guess I'll just stick with CLI only for now (via darwin-nix)
Mullvad, your turn next please
i don't get it.
My recommendation is to rethink it to work like apps like 1Password, Default Folder, Keyboard Maestro, Ice, etc., where I can always easily open a configuration app, but the service must be intentionally/knowingly quit via either the configuration app or the menu bar utility.
TLDR: Please separate the service from the new configuration app.
i enabled route advertising and managed to ping my google cloud instances using tailscale
problem is the packet loss rate is high. SSH tunnel worked!
soo i think there is something wrong with tailscale
It is an app that sits in the background and provides connectivity. Occasionally you need to change a setting. Absolutely nobody wants a rich windowed UI, or a menu bar widget that drops down a complex detail card.
I hope they can see this is exactly what killed desktop anti-virus: something that was supposed to be quietly doing its job in the background started getting in the users way. It needed to poke its head up and scream "hey remember me?" at the behest of some product managers or growth hackers. Eventually it got so bad Microsoft just baked it into the OS. Tailscale is on even worse footing here because Apple is even quicker to act when you destroy user experience.