Birth

English | 简体中文

Manage your Mac's startup items at a glance.

Birth is a free, open-source startup item manager for macOS. It gathers every background item, daemon, and login item on your system into one window, tells you who put it there (code-signing identity) and whether it's running right now — and lets you disable or remove any of them with one click.

launchd is PID 1 — every process on your Mac is born from it. Startup items are your Mac's birth rites; Birth lets you decide which ones deserve to stay.

Why

macOS scatters startup items across at least four mechanisms:

System Settings won't tell you where the plist lives, which executable it points to, or who signed it — and third-party updaters, helper processes, and uninstall leftovers thrive on exactly that opacity. Birth tears it off.

Features

Login Apps (everyday)

• Zero-permission viewing of the "Open at Login" list — works the moment you open the app, no prompts
• Add / remove login apps (a one-time Automation permission is requested only on your first change); you can also just drag an app into the window
• Every app shows its developer signing identity, plus the background pieces it quietly installed alongside itself (a "+N items" badge, one click away)
• Recently Removed: removed apps stay on a dedicated sidebar page, one click to re-enable

Advanced (audit)

• Four layers in one view: user agents / global agents / daemons / login items — third-party only by default, one click to include everything
• Signing identities verified against certificate-chain anchors: Apple / App Store / Identified Developer / Untrusted Certificate / Ad-hoc / Unsigned / Invalid
• Masquerade detection: items claiming com.apple.* whose signature disproves it get a red "Masquerading" badge — the most common malware persistence disguise
• Live run state (PID) and one-click enable/disable (password-free for user-level items; daemons go through the standard macOS administrator prompt)
• Search & locate: by name, developer, or path; type a PID and get an instant answer to "which startup item spawned this process"
• Filter & sort: filter by run state (running / loaded / not loaded) and enablement; click any of the five column headers to sort — the sort column and direction are remembered, Finder-style
• Safe removal: the job is stopped first, its plist goes to the Trash, and a backup is kept in ~/Library/Application Support/Birth/Backups
• Property-list viewer (binary plists rendered as readable XML)

Permissions: asked when needed, once

Missing permissions degrade gracefully: one-time setup guidance in the app, an automatic refresh when you come back from System Settings, and silence from then on.

Install

Requires macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later. Primarily developed and tested on macOS 26; if you hit problems on earlier versions, please file an issue.

Option 1: DMG

Download the latest Birth-x.x.x.dmg from Releases and drag Birth into Applications.

Birth is a personal open-source project and is not notarized by Apple. On first launch, macOS will warn that the developer can't be verified: go to System Settings → Privacy & Security and click "Open Anyway" at the bottom of the page — once.

Option 2: Build from source

git clone https://github.com/iAmCorey/birth.git
cd birth
./scripts/make-app.sh
open dist/Birth.app

(A Homebrew cask is planned.)

Development

swift test                    # unit tests
./scripts/release-check.sh    # release gate: tests → package → self-contained smoke launch → health checks
./scripts/make-dmg.sh         # distribution DMG

• SwiftUI + Swift Package Manager — no Xcode project file, zero third-party dependencies
• Three targets: BirthCore (scanning/control/signing, UI-free), BirthUI (the whole app, testable), Birth (a three-line main)
• release-check.sh must pass before every release — one red light and it doesn't ship

Notes & limitations

• The signing badge shows identity, not integrity: Birth verifies certificate-chain anchors ("who signed this"); it does not hash the full bundle contents — that's Gatekeeper's job.
• The Login Items category is read-only: macOS offers no third-party API to toggle these items, so Birth gives you a one-click jump to System Settings instead.
• Birth currently ships with an ad-hoc signature, which changes with every build. After upgrading, Full Disk Access and Automation permissions must be re-granted in System Settings (toggle Birth off and back on). Within a single version, a grant persists.

Uninstall

Move Birth.app to the Trash. For a deeper clean (optional):

defaults delete dev.birth.Birth                            # preferences
rm -rf ~/Library/Application\ Support/Birth                # removal backups

Don't forget to remove Birth's permissions in System Settings → Privacy & Security.

Feedback

Bugs and ideas → GitHub Issues.

Star History

License

MIT