App Guardian lives in your menu bar and quietly closes apps you forgot about — using Apple's on-device AI to make smart decisions. Zero config, zero cloud.
Every feature does exactly one thing, and does it well.
Asks Apple's on-device model: "Is it safe to quit this app?" Knows not to touch your music player, VPN, or background sync tools. Results cached per session.
After quitting, wipes ~/Library/Caches/<bundle> and any fuzzy-matched directories. Frees space you'd never find manually.
Tries a graceful quit first. Waits 10 seconds. If the app doesn't respond, it force-kills it. Nothing gets left hanging.
Finder, Dock, Spotlight, and other system apps are excluded by default. Add any app to the exclusion list straight from the menu bar — no config file needed.
Every close event persisted to a local JSON file. The built-in stats screen shows closes today, 7-day, all-time, cache freed, and your top offending apps.
Zero telemetry. The only network call is to localhost:11434 (apfel, running on your machine). Nothing leaves your computer.
Runs silently in the background — you only notice when you check the stats.
Records which app is in the foreground using macOS's NSWorkspace API. No Accessibility permissions required. Pure passive observation.
Scans all running apps. Any app idle past your threshold gets flagged. Apple Intelligence (via apfel) makes the final YES/NO call — or skip it and use pure timer logic.
Sends a graceful terminate signal. Force-kills if the app ignores it. Wipes the cache directory. Logs the freed bytes to history.json. Done.
# ── Recommended: Homebrew ─────────────────── brew tap TomGranot/app-guardian brew install app-guardian brew services start app-guardian # ── Or from source ─────────────────────────── git clone https://github.com/TomGranot/app-guardian cd app-guardian ./setup.sh ./run.sh # Auto-start on login (source install only) ./install-agent.sh # ── Apple Intelligence backend (optional) ─── brew tap Arthur-Ficial/tap brew install apfel apfel --serve
macOS 26 (Tahoe) + Apple Silicon for Apple Intelligence. Python 3.11+ for the app itself. The AI features are optional — disable them in the menu and it works on any Mac.
Run ./install-agent.sh to register a LaunchAgent. App Guardian will start automatically on login and restart itself if it ever crashes.
Toggle off "Use Apple Intelligence" in the menu bar. App Guardian will close all idle non-excluded apps based on the timer alone — fast and reliable.