I built Releases, a Mac app that tracks every app I release

I built Releases, a macOS app that keeps track of the apps I make. It’s free and open source, like Skillscout, Soundscape and NoteRepo.

In September I released CLI Tools, NoteRepo, Soundscape and Skillscout, and then new versions of three of them. GitHub shows one repo at a time, so I had no single place to see what I shipped and what was waiting for a release. Releases is that place.

Here’s the app in 30 seconds:

The home page is Latest Releases, every release of every project on one timeline, grouped by day. Each row shows what changed and how many people downloaded it. The changes come from the project’s CHANGELOG.md, or from the “What’s new” part of the release notes on GitHub. The release that launched an app gets a green background, so a new app stands out.

Above the timeline, Waiting to ship lists the projects with commits since their last release, and the ones whose version is already newer than the last release. That’s my to-do list for the week.

Each project has a page with its version and the file it comes from, its branch, the commits since the last release, and every release with its downloads.

When something is ready, Create Release suggests the next version, with buttons for a patch, minor or major bump. It opens the project in Cursor and puts the release prompt in the chat, with the version, the repo, and the commits since the last release. Nothing runs until I read it and send it.

The prompt asks the agent to use the skill I wrote to publish my apps, and lists the steps for agents that don’t have it. It works for projects that aren’t on GitHub yet, too. The agent then creates the repo first.

To add a project, drop its folder on the window, or click Add More… at the end of the sidebar. It lists the apps and command-line tools next to my projects that aren’t in Releases yet, the ones I worked on last first. The first time I opened it, it found 34 of them in my ~/dev folder. Clones of other people’s repos stay out, since Releases knows my GitHub account from the projects I already track.

Agents can do all of this without the window. The releases command does everything the app does, every command takes --json, and releases help --json describes them all:

releases recent
releases show soundscape --json

releases open drives the app. An agent can show me a project, or open its Create Release sheet with the version and the notes filled in, so I review it before anything happens:

releases open soundscape --release --bump minor

Releases reads my projects and their git history on my Mac, and has no accounts. It asks GitHub for the releases with the GitHub CLI’s token when I’m logged in, so private repos work too. The token stays in memory and never gets written to disk.

Under the hood it’s a Swift package with no dependencies: a core library with all the logic, and the SwiftUI app and the releases command on top of it. The app watches the list file, so a project an agent adds from the terminal shows up in the window right away.

Get it

The code is on GitHub at flaviocopes/releases, MIT licensed.

Download the zip from the latest release, unzip it, and drag Releases to your Applications folder. It runs on macOS 14 Sonoma or later, on Apple silicon and Intel Macs.

The app isn’t signed with an Apple Developer ID or notarized. The first time you open it, macOS says it “could not verify Releases is free of malware”. Click Done, go to System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll down to Releases, and click Open Anyway.

You can also remove the quarantine flag in Terminal, then open the app again:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Releases.app

The README explains what to do on a work laptop. The releases command isn’t in the zip yet, so build it from source with ./Scripts/install-cli.sh.

After that, Releases updates itself. It checks GitHub once a day, and Install and Relaunch puts the new version in place.

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