Apparency - The App that Open Apps

For technically inclined Mac aficionados, Apparency by Mothers Ruin Software is an app that also serves as a plugin for the macOS QuickLook feature. After installing Apparency, you can select an app in the Finder, press the spacebar and get a variety of information in the resulting window. You can take it one step further and choose to open the app in Apparency to answer even more questions including:

• What did Gatekeeper say?
• Was it notarized?
• Is App Sandbox enabled?
• Inspect the code signature
• Browse entitlements
• Browse the Info.plist
• Find the executable
• See macOS version info
• Inspect linked frameworks
• See identifiers and versions
• Browse “components” inside
• See document types and URLs

Apparency is a free app and currently supports Intel and Apple silicon processors on Mac OS versions 12, 13 and 14. Download here

Apparency was updated to v2 on 2024-04-24. The major changes were:

• You can now use AppleScript to automate Apparency. Read about what you can do with AppleScript and Apparency or use Help > Open Scripting Dictionary to browse Apparency's terminology, along with many example scripts.
• Improved performance when opening components, especially for large or complex apps. Apparency now does more of its analysis in the background, which means the window will open more quickly, and the app shouldn't SPOD while doing analysis. Also, the top-level component is now given priority to start signature verification, so that this most-likely-to-be-interesting information is shown as soon as possible.
• When opening a Developer ID-signed app, Apparency will now request an updated notification ticket from Apple servers before evaluating the Notarization and Gatekeeper status. This is to avoid a misleading Unnotarized Developer ID status on an app that actually is notarized, but that wasn't “stapled” and hasn't been launched yet. https://www.mothersruin.com/software/Apparency/relnotes.html