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2026-05-22

Building BatteryGO — Why I Made Yet Another Battery App

There are dozens of battery utilities on the Mac App Store. I made another one. Here's what I learned about scoping a simple product down to what really mattered.

macosapp-storedesign

The crowded shelf

When I started building BatteryGO, the Mac App Store already had at least a dozen battery monitoring apps. My friends asked the obvious question — why make another one?

The honest answer: I wanted a battery app that did exactly one thing well, and none of the existing ones felt like they were built that way. Most either bundled too many features (display brightness control, fan speed, CPU temperature) or required a paid subscription for the parts I actually needed.

What I cut

Building BatteryGO was mostly an exercise in saying no.

  • No login. A battery indicator should not need an account.
  • No charts. Battery wear over months is interesting, but it's not what I check during the day.
  • No notifications. macOS already notifies me when battery is low. Doubling that adds noise.
  • No menu bar customization screen. One icon, one color, fixed position. Done.

What remained was a single number with one color, a glance away.

Design decisions that took longer than the code

The code for the menu bar component was about 200 lines of Swift. The design decisions took weeks:

  • Should the percentage use a colored badge, or change icon color? (Color, less visual weight.)
  • Below what percentage should the color flip to red? (15%, matching macOS native warning.)
  • When charging, should it show a lightning bolt? (Yes, but small enough to read as decoration.)

Release shape

BatteryGO is free, no in-app purchases, no ads inside the app itself. The release came with a single screenshot, one paragraph of description, no marketing video. It got featured anyway because the App Store editorial team noticed the minimalism.

A lesson: doing less, but doing it cleanly, is a kind of marketing.

What I would change

Looking back, the only thing I would add is an optional discharge-rate display under the menu bar dropdown. Knowing the percentage is one thing — knowing it's burning 12%/hour right now is a different signal. That's the version 2.0 patch I keep meaning to ship.