Download Beacon

Apple requires a paid Developer ID — $99 a year — to notarize apps distributed outside the Mac App Store. Beacon is a free, independent project without that subscription, so macOS shows its standard warning for any unsigned app from the internet: "Beacon.app is damaged and can't be opened" or "cannot be opened because the developer cannot be verified." The app is not damaged; that is just what macOS says about anything unsigned.

Most people never see this. Both the install script and Homebrew clear the quarantine flag as part of installing, so Beacon opens normally the first time. If you used either of those, there is nothing to do here.

The manual DMG route is the one that hits it, because dragging an app out of a disk image leaves macOS's quarantine attribute attached. Run this once in Terminal after dragging Beacon into Applications:

Then open Beacon normally. You will not need to do it again for this version. As an alternative without Terminal: right-click Beacon.app → Open → Open in the dialog that appears, which bypasses Gatekeeper for that one launch.

xattr -cr removes the quarantine attribute macOS attaches to downloaded files. It does not disable any security check — it tells macOS "I have reviewed this and trust it," which is exactly what the right-click-Open flow does through the UI.

• macOS 12 (Monterey) or later.
• Apple Silicon or Intel — both are published with every release, and both the install script and Homebrew detect which you have. You only need to know if you are picking a DMG by hand: on the About This Mac panel, anything listed as an M-series chip is Apple Silicon; anything listed as an Intel Core is not.
• macOS only. There are no Windows or Linux builds, and no committed date for other platforms yet.

Beacon checks for updates at most once an hour: shortly after launch if it has not checked in the last hour, and then hourly while it keeps running. When a newer version exists, a toast appears in the bottom-right reading "Beacon <version> is available" with the release notes underneath — expand What's new to read what changed before deciding. Download & Install does the rest, then leaves you a Restart to finish button to press when you are ready — Beacon never restarts itself out from under you. Dismiss the toast to deal with it later; Settings → General → Check for Updates runs a check on demand.

If you installed through Homebrew, you can also upgrade from the terminal:

Read this first: the second command's ~/Library/Application Support/beacon path is your local SQLite database — collections, requests, environments, history, cookies, flows, monitors and settings. Removing it deletes all of that permanently, with no hosted backup to restore from. Export anything you want to keep before you run it. Homebrew leaves that directory in place unless you add --zap, so the first command on its own is non-destructive.

This page is built from release v0.2.0, published 11 August 2026. Nothing on this site talks to GitHub on its own — press the button and it will ask, once.