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Top 23 Apple Open-Source Projects
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awesome-mac
This project is dedicated to collecting high-quality macOS software and organizing them systematically by different categories for easy search and use.
Project mention: Awesome-mac: The GitHub Repo I Bookmark for Every Mac Setup (99.8K Stars) | dev.to | 2026-03-10Then you find awesome-mac — a GitHub repository with 99,800 stars, maintained by 460 developers, updated constantly, and every single app cross-checked by the community via pull requests.
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Project mention: A low-carbon computing platform from your retired phones | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-06-13
This group’s approach of treating the devices as many weaker servers (basically a raspberry pi cluster) sounds like the most realistic way to reuse phone hardware at scale, especially with the backing of the actual hardware vendor.
It’s a genuine shame how locked down iPhones are compared to even Android. Hypothetically you could run Linux inside UTM[0] but outside the EU Apple makes it intentionally difficult, and there’s still memory restrictions and performance penalties.
My group’s senior year project was a computing cluster on phones (specifically targetting LLM inference) [1]. Instead of installing a new OS we built separate apps per OS. Our devices were older, so the Android phones had worse hardware and the iPhones had more software restraints.
[0] https://getutm.app/
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MonitorControl
🖥 Control your display's brightness & volume on your Mac as if it was a native Apple Display. Use Apple Keyboard keys or custom shortcuts. Shows the native macOS OSDs.
Project mention: Show HN: OS layer for running multiple Codex agents in parallel | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-09-19I recommend adding an installable executable. It seems like you are expecting people to clone your repo and then run it locally?
Take a look at Monitor Control how they structured their GitHub Readme and release page to download a dmg https://github.com/MonitorControl/MonitorControl
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CodeEdit
📝 CodeEdit App for macOS – Elevate your code editing experience. Open source, free forever.
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Project mention: Supercharge your macOS workspace management with Aerospace - A guide for busy people | dev.to | 2026-06-06
You can view the default config to get a general idea and to also learn what other shortcuts are available to you. If you want to dig deeper, have a look at the official documentation, or this excellent YouTube Guide by Josean Martinez. You can also have a look at my config for a minimal example.
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awesome-macOS
A curated list of awesome applications, softwares, tools and shiny things for macOS.
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cua
Open-source infrastructure for Computer-Use Agents. Sandboxes, SDKs, and benchmarks to train and evaluate AI agents that can control full desktops (macOS, Linux, Windows).
Project mention: Following acquisition by OpenAI, Tart is still proprietary software | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-06-10To be clear, this does technically meet the very minimal commitment[1] they gave when announcing the acquisition:
> In the coming weeks, we will relicense all of our source-available tools, including Tart, Vetu and Orchard under a more permissive license. (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47730194)
In this case they moved from one source-available license (Fair Source License v0.9 with seat restrictions) to another (Fair Source License 1.1-ALv2 without seat restrictions), with the same sort of restrictions on field-of-endeavor as before.
Why they've chosen this isn't super clear, as (1) there are already open-source alternatives that use the same storage formats as Tart, like Lume[2]; and (2) Tart is certainly already in the training sets of all of OpenAI's "direct competitors", who are practically held back little or not at all by the restrictions of the FSL. The only entities this really restricts are F/OSS distributions which might otherwise include Tart as a first-class package in their distros. :-\
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1: https://web.archive.org/web/20260412071019/https://cirruslab...
2: https://github.com/trycua/cua/tree/main/libs/lume
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openhaystack
Build your own 'AirTags' 🏷 today! Framework for tracking personal Bluetooth devices via Apple's massive Find My network.
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Project mention: Zml-smi: universal monitoring tool for GPUs, TPUs and NPUs | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-04-04
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Project mention: Why your early 2000s photos are probably lost forever | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-01-03
From a UX perspective Airdrop is super nice. I don't know if there are working implementations for other OSs. Just found this here but didn't yet test it https://github.com/seemoo-lab/opendrop (hasn't been updated in 2 years, so maybe not too promising)
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ipatool
Command-line tool that allows searching and downloading app packages (known as ipa files) from the iOS App Store
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OSX-PROXMOX
Voilà, install macOS on ANY Computer! This is really and magic easiest way! PVE 7.XX ~ 8.XX Support and macOS High Sierra ~ macOS Sequoia Support.
Project mention: Quickemu: Quickly create and run optimised Windows, macOS and Linux VMs | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-12-30Don’t kill the messenger but https://github.com/luchina-gabriel/OSX-PROXMOX
I installed Sequoia but it’s painfully slow on a 4 core 3ghz something or other. I previously did the one after high sierra and it’s reasonably snappy, but APFS outdated for my situation
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About-SwiftUI
Gathering all info published, both by Apple and by others, about new framework SwiftUI.
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Lyricify-App
Lyricify (/lɪ'rɪsəfaɪ/), a fantastic app to provide scroll lyrics for Spotify and other apps. 一款为 Spotify 等各种应用提供滚动歌词的软件。
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SwiftyStoreKit
Lightweight In App Purchases Swift framework for iOS 8.0+, tvOS 9.0+ and macOS 10.10+ ⛺
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NOTE:
The open source projects on this list are ordered by number of github stars.
The number of mentions indicates repo mentiontions in the last 12 Months or
since we started tracking (Dec 2020).
Apple discussion
Apple related posts
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A low-carbon computing platform from your retired phones
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My browser tool returned "[object Promise]" as a webpage. One grep later, 10 more tools had the same bug.
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I had a focus guard. macOS Tahoe walked through it three times.
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macOS Needs Its Grid Back
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Monal IM 6.4.21 released – open-source Jabber/XMPP client for macOS and iOS
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Windows computer-use: synthetic cursors for background agents
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Apple: Human Interface Guidelines
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A note from our sponsor - SaaSHub
www.saashub.com | 13 Jun 2026
Index
What are some of the best open-source Apple projects? This list will help you:
| # | Project | Stars |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | awesome-mac | 105,552 |
| 2 | open-source-ios-apps | 50,678 |
| 3 | UTM | 34,345 |
| 4 | MonitorControl | 33,022 |
| 5 | CodeEdit | 22,888 |
| 6 | macOS-Security-and-Privacy-Guide | 22,435 |
| 7 | AeroSpace | 21,206 |
| 8 | awesome-macOS | 18,697 |
| 9 | cua | 17,809 |
| 10 | openhaystack | 12,833 |
| 11 | SVProgressHUD | 12,461 |
| 12 | nvtop | 10,716 |
| 13 | opendrop | 9,647 |
| 14 | ipatool | 9,359 |
| 15 | WWDC | 8,747 |
| 16 | MochiDiffusion | 7,892 |
| 17 | OSX-PROXMOX | 7,185 |
| 18 | About-SwiftUI | 7,074 |
| 19 | CoreML-Models | 7,015 |
| 20 | Lyricify-App | 6,940 |
| 21 | SwiftyStoreKit | 6,679 |
| 22 | periphery | 6,135 |
| 23 | Brooklyn | 5,626 |
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