MacWrench 1.1.7 — Analytics that respect your privacy

The problem with flying blind

When you're one person building an app, you don't get the luxury of a product team running user research. I have no idea which features people actually use. Is anyone opening the Homebrew tab? Do most people stick to the Cleaner? Am I spending weeks on something nobody touches? Without some form of analytics, I'm guessing — and guessing is a terrible way to decide what to build next.

But most analytics tools are invasive. They fingerprint devices, track users across apps, feed data to ad networks. That's not something I want in MacWrench, and it's not something you should have to deal with either.

Why TelemetryDeck

I went with TelemetryDeck because it does exactly what I need and nothing more. No personal data collection, no third-party ad networks, no cross-app tracking. It runs entirely on European infrastructure, which means GDPR compliance out of the box — no cookie banners, no consent dialogs for the analytics themselves.

What it tells me: aggregate usage patterns. Things like "how many people opened the Homebrew tab this week" or "what percentage of users ran a cleaning scan." It doesn't tell me who did those things. There are no user profiles, no session recordings, no behavioral graphs. Just counts and trends. That's enough to know where to focus.

A crash reporter that asks first

MacWrench interacts heavily with the system — running shell commands, parsing Homebrew output, scanning /Applications, managing file deletions across 21 cleanup categories. Crashes happen. Until now, I had no way to know about them unless someone emailed me.

This release adds a built-in crash reporter. It hooks into unhandled POSIX signals and NSExceptions, writes the crash data to disk immediately (before the process dies), and then reads it on the next launch. If you've opted in to analytics, it sends a minimal crash report to TelemetryDeck — just the signal type, a stack trace, and the app version. If you haven't opted in, the crash data sits on disk and never leaves your machine. No silent background reporting, no phoning home without permission.

Relaxed signature checks for app updates

Also in this release: I loosened the Sparkle signature verification for direct app updates. Some legitimate apps — particularly those distributed outside the App Store — weren't passing the strict Ed25519 + DSA dual-signature check that MacWrench was enforcing. The app would detect an available update, download it, and then refuse to install it because the signature didn't meet the bar. That's been fixed. MacWrench now accepts standard Sparkle signing, which covers the vast majority of apps that use appcast-based updates.

Full list of changes is in the changelog.