Make macOS stop wrecking your battery.
Charge limiting, heat-aware charging, sleep-safe enforcement, and one-tap save modes — all from your menu bar, built for Apple Silicon.
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Lithium batteries wear out fastest when they sit at a high charge and when they run hot. macOS does both by default: it keeps you topped up at 100% and lets the machine cook while it's docked and closed. Apple's own "Optimized Charging" tries to help, but it's a black box — it decides when to hold at 80%, and you can't.
Battlify hands you the controls directly. Pick a charge ceiling and it holds there. Tell it to stop charging when the battery gets warm and it will. It's a small menu-bar app that does one thing well, and it stays out of your way the rest of the time.
Charging & longevity
- Charge limit — cap charging anywhere from 50–100%. Battlify holds the level
with a hysteresis band so it isn't flicking the charger on and off at the
threshold. It speaks both Apple Silicon SMC schemes (legacy
CH0B/CH0Cand the newerCHTEon macOS 26 "Tahoe"). - Heat-aware charging — pause charging when the battery climbs past a temperature you set, then resume once it cools. The menu tells you why charging is paused, so it never looks broken.
- Discharge to the limit — on Macs that support adapter control, if you plug in above your limit Battlify can run off the battery until it drifts back down, instead of just waiting.
- Charge to 100% once — one tap temporarily lifts the limit for a full charge (handy before a trip), then reverts itself the moment the battery is full. Good for the occasional full cycle a battery actually likes.
Sleep-safe enforcement
The catch with any charge limiter: the enforcer can't run while the Mac is asleep, so a naive limiter lets macOS quietly charge to 100% overnight. Battlify closes that gap two ways, and you choose which:
- Stop charging before sleep — cuts charging as the machine goes to sleep, so it can't top up past your limit while nothing's watching.
- Prevent idle sleep while plugged in — holds a power assertion (only on wall power, never on battery) so the limit stays continuously enforced.
MagSafe LED
- Drive the MagSafe LED from the actual charge state: orange while charging, green when it's holding at your limit, and off briefly right after wake while charging settles. Or force it off, or hand it back to macOS — three modes, your call. Only shows up on Macs that have a controllable LED.
Save modes & lid automation
- One-tap Save Modes — Off / Normal / Super Saver flip a whole bundle of settings at once instead of hunting through toggles.
- Super Save when the lid closes — closing the lid drops into maximum savings (Low Power Mode, sleep wake-ups off, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth off) and opening it puts everything back the way you left it.
- Sleep & Idle controls — Power Nap, wake-for-network, and TCP keep-alive are the settings that silently wake your Mac in a bag. Turn them off from one place.
Insight & convenience
- Battery Health card with the numbers that matter (cycle count, capacity, temperature) and plain-language tips.
- Usage history charts, plus a per-close readout of how much charge a closed-lid session actually cost you.
- Lid / clamshell sensor that warns you when you're docked-and-closed at a high charge — the worst-case aging scenario.
- Quick Actions — dim or brighten the display, blank it, or sleep the Mac.
- Launch at login and in-app auto-update, and it'll tell you if the helper ever falls out of date so features don't silently stop working.
Writing SMC keys needs root, but you don't want a GUI running as root. So Battlify splits in two:
- A menu-bar app that runs as you and never touches the SMC directly.
- A tiny root helper (
battlify-helper), installed once as a LaunchDaemon. It owns the enforcement loop, auto-starts at every boot, and talks to the app over a local socket.
If the helper is ever stopped or killed, it re-enables charging on the way out — so Battlify can never leave your Mac unable to charge.
Battlify is a native Swift app, and it's built to be a quiet background citizen:
- Event-driven, not busy. Charge and power-source changes arrive as IOKit notifications; the fallback timers are slow and declare scheduling tolerance, so macOS batches their wake-ups with other work instead of spinning up the CPU on a fixed beat. Expensive things (like listing energy-hungry processes) only run while you're actually looking at them.
- Menu-bar only. No Dock icon, no window kept alive in the background — the UI is built on demand when you open the menu.
- Small, lean builds. Release binaries are size-optimized and symbol-stripped, and the root helper is a minimal daemon with no UI at all.
A note on memory, since people ask: a native Cocoa/SwiftUI app's "Memory" figure in Activity Monitor is dominated by shared system framework pages that every app counts — it isn't private cost. The honest metric for a battery tool is energy impact and wake-ups, and Battlify is tuned to keep both low. It won't fit in a few megabytes (no framework-linked app does), but it also won't sit there draining you.
brew tap broisnischal/battlify
brew install --cask battlifyHomebrew asks you to trust the tap the first time (its gate for any
third-party tap) — accept, or run brew trust broisnischal/battlify. The cask
clears the download quarantine on install, so the app launches straight away even
though it isn't notarized yet.
Update later with brew upgrade --cask battlify.
- Download the latest
Battlify-x.y.z.dmgfrom Releases and drag Battlify into Applications. - Because the build isn't notarized yet, macOS may say it's "damaged" — it isn't.
Clear the quarantine flag once:
(Homebrew does this for you; only needed for the manual DMG.)
sudo xattr -r -d com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Battlify.app
Then, either way:
- Launch it — it lives in the menu bar, not the Dock. (It's a background app, so opening it again just brings the menu-bar item to attention — it won't open a window.)
- Click Install Helper in the menu (one password prompt). The helper is a LaunchDaemon, so it starts at boot and keeps running on its own.
- Updates install themselves: Update in the menu downloads the new version, replaces the app in place, and relaunches it.
For Battlify's limit to behave predictably, disable Apple's competing feature:
- System Settings → Battery → Battery Health → ⓘ → turn off "Optimized Battery Charging."
- On macOS 26.4+, also turn off the built-in Charge Limit there.
Free for 30 days. Your free days are only spent on days you actually use Battlify, so you get the full month of real use without a countdown breathing down your neck.
$2.99 to own. One-time payment (plus tax) — no subscription, no add-ons. Pay with Apple Pay in a couple of taps, in-app or here.
Requires the Swift toolchain (Xcode or the Command Line Tools), macOS 14+, and an Apple Silicon Mac.
swift build
swift run Battlify # run the menu-bar app
sudo ./scripts/install-helper.sh # install the root helper daemon
./scripts/package-app.sh 0.8.1 # build Battlify.app
./scripts/make-dmg.sh 0.8.1 # build the DMGSee DISTRIBUTION.md for signing, notarization, the GitHub
Actions release pipeline, Gumroad setup, and the auto-update feed.
This repo uses Changesets:
npm install
npm run changeset # describe your change (patch / minor / major)Commit the generated .changeset/*.md. Merging the auto-opened "Version Packages"
PR bumps the version and CHANGELOG.md; pushing that version tag triggers the
release build.
The app and helper speak a small versioned protocol over their socket. When you
change what the daemon does, bump ControlProtocol.version — the app compares it to
the running helper and warns when the installed helper is out of date, and you'll
need to reinstall it (sudo ./scripts/install-helper.sh) for the change to take
effect.
Battlify is source-available under the Battlify License: do almost anything with the source, with protections against malicious or rip-off redistributions of the app itself.
Charge-control SMC keys and MagSafe LED behavior were learned from batt and battery. Thanks to those projects.