The Mac app

What the Mac companion app does, the permissions it needs, and why you cannot download it yet.

Status: Implemented, not publicly downloadable · Last verified: 31 July 2026

There is no public signed and notarized download yet. The Mac app is built and works – pairing, local indexing, and cloud sync of derived data are all implemented – but the customer-facing distribution path is not live, so you cannot install it today. This page describes what it does and what it will ask for. It is not yet a set of steps you can follow.

To be told when the build is available, email team@remly.it.

The Mac app is a companion to your web account. It does two things: watch and index local files, and run a global search popover across your local and cloud content. Everything else – connectors, billing, MCP setup, Library, settings – lives in the web app.

System requirements

Supported macOS versions, Apple Silicon and Intel support, and disk requirements will be published here against the actual release build. They are not documented yet, and we would rather leave this blank than guess.

Permissions it requests

On first launch the app asks for the following. Each is requested for a specific reason, and denying one degrades a specific capability rather than breaking the app:

Permission	Why it is requested	If you deny it
Full Disk Access	To read the folders you choose to index, including locations macOS protects by default.	Remly can only index folders macOS grants without it. Protected locations are skipped.
Accessibility	To bind and handle the global search shortcut from any app.	The global popover shortcut will not fire. You can still open the app from the menu bar.
Login Items	To start indexing in the background after you log in.	Indexing only runs while you launch the app manually, so your index goes stale between sessions.
Notifications	To tell you about pairing problems, paused sync, and cap or permission errors.	Sync and permission problems fail silently; you have to check the app to notice.

How pairing works

You sign up and subscribe on the web first. The Mac app then pairs to that account: it opens your browser, you sign in through Clerk, and the device is registered against your account with its own device token. The app checks your subscription state before unlocking, so an inactive subscription leaves it locked.

Paired devices appear in Settings → Account → Devices in the web app, with version and index health, and can be signed out individually.

Choosing folders

For every folder you add, you pick one of two modes:

Local only – extracted text and embeddings stay in the app's local database on your Mac. Searchable from the popover. Not visible to the web app, to the MCP server, or to anything else.
Sync to cloud – derived text, embeddings, and metadata are uploaded so the folder is searchable from the web app and MCP, and from your other paired devices.

~/Documents, ~/Desktop, and ~/Downloads default to Local only and require an explicit opt-in before anything syncs.

Watching uses macOS FSEvents rather than a polling schedule, so edits are picked up in seconds.

What leaves your Mac

Original local file binaries are not stored in Remly's tenant index. If you opt a folder into cloud sync, derived text, embeddings, and metadata are uploaded. Image pixels may transit /api/image-extract and may be sent to OpenAI for OCR; the text that comes back is indexed and deleted like any other content. See privacy and security.

This matters most for image-heavy folders. If you do not want image content processed off-device, keep those folders Local only.

Deletion behaves differently in each mode

Local only: deleting or moving a file leaves a local tombstone. The item stops appearing in results and can be recovered if the file comes back.
Synced folders: the deletion propagates to the cloud index, which purges the derived chunks and embeddings for that item.
Turning off sync for a folder removes the cloud-side derived data for it. It does not touch the files on your Mac.
Uninstalling the app leaves your files untouched and removes the local index when you delete the app's application-support directory.

Troubleshooting

Symptom	What to check
Device shows as stale or offline in the web app	The app has not reported a heartbeat. Relaunch it and confirm Login Items is granted.
Folders index nothing	Full Disk Access. Protected locations are silently skipped without it.
Sync is paused	You may have hit a daily indexing cap. Indexing resumes on the next window; see usage limits.
Global shortcut does nothing	Accessibility permission, or another app has claimed the same shortcut.
Pairing fails or the app stays locked	Confirm the subscription is active in the web app, then re-pair.
Results look out of date	Re-index the folder from the app. FSEvents can miss changes made while the app was not running.

Local files – what gets indexed and the local-versus-cloud choice
Privacy and security – how derived data and OCR are handled
Release status

On this page