I'm Theodore Harding, an indie Mac developer based in the UK. I've been making small Mac apps for years, mostly for myself. Shiny is the first one I built because someone else needed it, and that's the difference.
This post is partly a brand piece (so people can decide whether they trust me), and partly the honest version of why this app exists at all. If you don't care about the story, the bottom line is at the end.
The phone call
Christmas 2024. My mother's 2020 MacBook Air, the 8 GB one, had been steadily getting slower for about six months. By December it was bad enough that opening Safari took twenty seconds and switching tabs felt like the laptop was thinking carefully about whether it wanted to.
She asked me to fix it. Over the phone. From a different country.
I walked her through the obvious things: quit Chrome (she had thirty-two tabs open across two windows), restart, free up some disk space, turn off the apps she didn't realise were starting up automatically. It helped, briefly. A week later she was back where she started.
I asked her what apps she'd installed in the last year. She mentioned a "Mac cleaner" that a friend had recommended. It was running scans, showing red bars, and reminding her every few days that her Mac was at risk. The subscription renewal was due in February. $40 a year.
The app was real, well-known, not a scam. But for her, it was solving a problem she didn't have (no malware on her Mac, no real maintenance to do) while charging her $40 for the privilege of being scared.
What she actually needed
I asked her: when does the Mac feel slowest?
Her answer: late afternoon, after she'd been on it all day, with Mail, Safari, Notes, and her photo viewer all open.
I checked Activity Monitor over a video call. Her memory pressure was sitting in deep yellow, edging red at points. The Mac wasn't broken; it was just out of working room. macOS was holding onto memory for apps she'd used hours ago, the cleaner app was adding its own footprint, and there was no easy way for her to clear it without restarting (which she was reluctant to do because she had things open).
What she needed was a button. Click it, the working room comes back, the Mac feels new again. No app to open, no scan to run, no warnings to dismiss. Just a button.
So I built her one.
The first version
The first version of Shiny was a 200-line Swift script that lived in her menu bar. When she clicked it, it asked macOS to release inactive memory pages and closed the orphaned helper processes some apps leave behind when they crash. That's it. No malware scanner. No disk cleaner. No "Smart Care" reminder.
I sent her the build over Christmas. She used it. The pressure dropped, the Mac felt better, she stopped calling me about it.
Six months later I asked if she still used the cleaner app she'd been paying for. She said no. She'd cancelled the subscription. The button was enough.
That's when I knew this might be a real product.
The decisions
The interesting part of building a small app is the decisions you make about what NOT to do. For Shiny, those were:
One job. Shiny only frees memory. It doesn't scan for malware, doesn't uninstall apps, doesn't visualise your disk. macOS already has built-in malware protection (XProtect), AppCleaner is free for uninstalling, DaisyDisk is great for disk visualisation. Combining all of those into one app means worse versions of each. Better to do one thing well.
One price. $4.99, paid once, on up to three Macs. No subscription. The job doesn't change month-to-month, so charging recurring money for it would be dishonest. New macOS versions get free updates because that's part of "the app working", not a new feature.
No telemetry. I don't know how many people use Shiny daily, which features they tap, or whether the average session lasts ten seconds or thirty. I'd rather have user trust than user data, especially for a $4.99 utility where the trade isn't worth it.
No popups. Shiny will never tell you your Mac is at risk, never push you to upgrade, never run a scan you didn't ask for. It sits in the menu bar quietly until you click it. The only time it makes a sound is when it shows you what it just freed.
None of these are heroic decisions. They're just what the right shape of a small honest tool looks like.
What it's not
Shiny is not a CleanMyMac killer. CleanMyMac is a real, well-built product made by a serious company; if you want a full Mac-maintenance suite, it's a reasonable choice. (See Shiny vs CleanMyMac for the honest comparison.)
Shiny is also not a long-term subscription business. It's a one-person side project that pays for the time I spend on it and not much more. If it grows, great. If it stays small, also great. Neither outcome makes me adjust the product to chase money I don't need.
And Shiny is not for users who don't actually have memory pressure. If your Mac is mostly fine and your memory pressure stays green, you don't need it. (See are Mac cleaner apps worth it for the longer version of this advice.)
Where to find me
Shiny is made by me, alone, from a desk in the UK. If something goes wrong, you email support@theodorehq.com and you'll get a reply from me, usually the same day.
I'm on X (Twitter) as @_theo_dore if you want to see the build process or ask questions in public. The blog you're reading is the closest thing to a roadmap.
If you've read this far, thank you. Whether or not you buy Shiny, I hope your Mac feels new again soon.