BetterBattery

A tiny macOS menu bar app that shows — live, every second — how much power is flowing into (or out of) your MacBook's battery.

_{Direct download · macOS 13+ · free & open source · all releases · ☕ buy me a coffee}

A clean, flat, iOS-style battery icon sits in your menu bar. Click it for the live panel: charge/discharge wattage, battery percentage ring, time to full or time remaining, charger wattage, battery health, and cycle count.

Install

1. Click the Download button above (it always grabs the newest DMG)
2. Open it and drag BetterBattery into Applications
3. Launch it from Applications — the battery icon appears in your menu bar

First launch on a fresh download: releases aren't notarized with a paid Apple Developer ID (yet), so macOS may block the first open. If double-clicking shows a warning, go to System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll down to the "BetterBattery was blocked" notice, and click Open Anyway (on older macOS versions, right-click the app → Open works too). This is only needed once.

Requires macOS 13 Ventura or later. No special permissions — battery data is read from public IOKit properties.

Features

• Live battery wattage — positive and green while charging (energy flowing into the battery), and the real-time draw while on battery. Read from IOKit's instantaneous amperage × voltage at 1 Hz.
• iOS-style battery icon — modern and flat, with the reading punched into the battery shape. Choose what it shows inside: nothing, percentage (like 75), time remaining (like 6h35m; time to full while charging), or live watts with a direction arrow — ▴26W charging into the battery, ▾8.4W being drawn from it.
• State color theme — green while charging or plugged in, blue on battery, then orange and red as you cross your low-battery thresholds. The panel ring, the wattage number, and the menu bar icon all follow.
• Low-battery alerts — warning and critical percentages set to any value from 1–20%, plus an optional pulsing neon glow around the screen edges (orange, then red) so a dying battery is impossible to miss. When the charger lands mid-glow, an optional green celebration shimmer fades it out. Test buttons preview every effect — press Esc to end a preview.
• Time estimates — time to full / time remaining, same numbers as the system battery menu.
• History charts — battery level or charge/discharge wattage over a selectable 4h / 24h / 7d window, with history persisted to disk across relaunches, an optional temperature overlay (one click on the temp chip), and a long-term Health trend view built from daily snapshots.
• Charge limit aware — pairs with macOS Tahoe 26.4's native 80–95% charge limit: one click opens the Battery setting, and the panel shows when charging is being held.
• Stats for nerds — a collapsible grid of live tiles: battery temperature with a gauge, a fan that actually spins at the real RPM, volts × amps, session energy and average draw, adapter wattage, capacity bar (current / full / design mAh), color-coded health and cycles, and lifetime energy — measured since install plus an estimate from your battery's cycle history, translated into how long it could power the average U.S. home.
• A calm, glanceable layout — hero readout and history up top; Settings, Low Battery, and Stats for Nerds tucked into collapsible sections; update controls anchored at the bottom.
• In-app updates — the app checks this repo's Releases page and can download and open the new version for you.
• Native SwiftUI, light/dark aware, no Dock icon, optional Launch at Login.

Updates

BetterBattery checks GitHub for a new release every few hours (and there's a Check for Updates button in the panel). When one is available, click Install Update — the app downloads the new version, verifies it against the sha256 GitHub publishes for the release, swaps itself in place, and relaunches. One click, no dragging.

Build from source

git clone https://github.com/michaelmax98/BetterBattery.git
cd BetterBattery
swift run -c release      # run it directly
./build-app.sh            # or build build/BetterBattery.app

Releases are built by GitHub Actions: pushing a v* tag compiles the app on a macOS runner, packages the DMG, and publishes it to the Releases page.

How it reads power

Wattage comes from the AppleSmartBattery IORegistry entry (InstantAmperage × Voltage). Positive means the battery is being charged; negative means it's powering the Mac. Two things that are normal: into-battery watts are lower than your charger's rating (the charger also powers the Mac itself), and ~0 W while plugged in means the battery is full or Optimized Battery Charging is holding it.

Support

Free and open source. If it earns a spot in your menu bar, you can buy me a coffee ☕

License

MIT