Privacy
Active Window Manager was built to keep everything on your Mac, so this page is short. It covers two things: the app, and this website. Plain language, no surprises.
The short version
No account, no analytics. Window titles and positions are read through macOS Accessibility and processed entirely on your Mac. The app's only routine network request is a cryptographically signed update check.
And this website is just as quiet – the contact form is the only place it processes personal data.
The app
Everything in this section describes the app itself: what it reads, what it keeps, and the one network request it makes.
What AWM reads
AWM needs the macOS Accessibility permission – it's the system API for listing, raising, moving and closing other apps' windows, which is the whole job. A guided setup walks you through granting it.
Through that permission, AWM reads window titles, positions and sizes – the information it needs to draw the window strip and to carry out what you click. All of it is processed in memory, on your Mac, and never transmitted anywhere. The same goes for the smaller details the strip shows, such as tab counts. If you use Chrome-profile color markers, AWM also reads the profile names from Google Chrome's local settings files on your Mac – again locally, like everything else.
What AWM stores locally
Your settings – layout, looks, behavior – along with pinned windows, window aliases (the names you give windows) and color markers are stored locally on your Mac. Nothing syncs to any server, and there is nothing to sign in to.
Settings can be exported as a JSON file (or copied to the clipboard) – but only when you ask, and the export goes only where you put it.
Screen Recording & live previews
Screen Recording permission is requested only if you turn on live previews. Everything else works without it.
When previews are on, hovering a window button renders a live preview on-screen, on your Mac. Preview frames are never written to disk and never transmitted – they exist only while you're looking at them.
AI title shortening
AI title shortening runs on-device with Apple Intelligence – window titles never leave your Mac. There is no cloud service behind the feature: the shortening happens with Apple's on-device models, and the shortened labels are cached locally so they don't have to be recomputed. Requires macOS 26 (Tahoe).
Auto-updates
AWM keeps itself current through a built-in updater. Routinely – at most once every 24 hours, or when you check manually – it fetches a small static manifest file over HTTPS to see whether a newer version exists, and downloads the update itself when there is one. Before installing anything, the app verifies what it downloaded: the manifest's Ed25519 signature, Apple's notarization and the developer's signing identity all have to check out, or the update is discarded.
The update check is a plain file download – no query parameters, no cookies, no custom headers beyond the standard ones every request sends. It carries no account and no personal identifiers; like any web request, it necessarily shows the feed server your IP address, which lands in standard server logs and nothing more.
This website
This is a static website – plain pages, no account system, no sign-in. It does not use analytics or advertising cookies.
Contact form. If you write to us through the form on the FAQ & Support page, the site sends your name, email address and message through its email provider (SendGrid) so your message arrives and a reply can reach you. That data is used solely to reply to you – it isn't added to any mailing list and isn't shared for marketing.
Spam protection. The contact form is protected by Google reCAPTCHA, which loads Google resources on the form page and is subject to Google's own privacy terms. It runs only there, not across the site.
Server logs. Like virtually every website, the server hosting these pages keeps standard access logs – IP address, browser type and time of request – used for security and to keep the site running.
Licensing
During 1.x there is no license key and no account – and before any future paid version introduces licensing, full details of how it handles data will be published on this page.
Your choices & contact
Questions about this policy, or requests about your data – for example, seeing what a message you sent contained, or having it deleted – go through the contact form at /faq#contact. A human reads it and a human replies.
Changes
If this policy changes in any material way, the change will be announced here, as a dated entry in the list below.
- (none yet – this is the first version of this policy)