My Mac Apps » Revok

Summary and Features

Revok is a valuable tool for macOS users seeking to gain deeper insights into their installed applications. You can use it to scan your apps for critical metadata and then review them by their usage, age, architecture, type, and many other properties for auditing purposes or just out of curiosity.

NOTE: Revok is donation-ware: totally free to use and fully functional. If you find it useful, you're invited to donate a token amount after using it. Anyone who makes a donation gets a nag-free version as a thank you.

Reviews

Screenshots

Revok

Scan all of your installed apps

View all of your apps or filter down to specific ones that match important attributes

Revok

Generate detailed scan reports

Generate a summary report on key app metadata and attributes across all of your apps

Revok

Get insightful, app-specific details

View a large amount of interesting information about your installed apps

Revok Demo Video


MD5 Hash: 1a0dcffc50588c8f4c5e53674b9c499b

Frequently Asked Questions

Yes. Revok only reads publicly available app metadata (via bundle keys, codesign, and Spotlight). It never modifies files or sends data anywhere. Nothing leaves your Mac. The app itself is signed and notarized.

No.

Revok gets this information from two macOS Spotlight keys: kMDItemLastUsedDate and kMDItemUseCount. These attributes can be somewhat brittle. Here's why:

kMDItemLastUsedDate

  • Not Updated Reliably by All Apps: Only applications that use Apple's standard file access APIs (like NSDocument or similar frameworks) reliably update it. Fortunately, most Mac apps use these APIs.
  • Caching and Spotlight Index Delays: Spotlight relies on background indexing, which means there's often a lag between actual usage and metadata updates. Cached values may remain stale if the indexer hasn’t refreshed.
  • Not Updated on All Access Events: For example, viewing a file in Quick Look or accessing via Terminal might not count as a "use" for Spotlight. Even just opening a file isn't guaranteed to update kMDItemLastUsedDate unless the app "touches" the file in a specific, trackable way.
  • macOS Security: Certain metadata access is limited unless the app has Full Disk access permission.
  • Dependent on Spotlight being Enabled: If Spotlight indexing is disabled for a volume or if the index is corrupted, kMDItemLastUsedDate won’t update or might be missing entirely.

kMDItemUseCount

  • Not Updated Reliably by All Apps: It’s typically only updated by AppKit-based apps (e.g., Preview, TextEdit).
    • Not Present on All File Types: Certain files simply don’t get this metadata applied, especially system files, unsigned apps, or files in excluded volumes.
  • No TTL for Data: There's no mechanism to track resets, so it's quite common for application updates and re-installs to reset the data. Sometimes this data is preserved across updates and sometimes it's not.

Revok relies on scanning for special keys inside each macOS application. One of these keys indicates if a given app is a Menu Bar app. However, it's possible for an app to omit this key and still run correctly -- even if it's bad form to do so. In effect, Revok relies on the information its given and has to assume its accurate if there are no fallbacks or alternative means of doing so.

That depends. I have toyed with the idea of making an enhanced version of Revok that is more suited to SMBs and schools that can do things like store scans into a database for comparisons over time (a prototype exists), a command line tool (prototype exists) that can be controlled by another program, and a scheduler that can kick off scans at specific times. However, I want to know if someone is willing to pay a modest fee for it before committing significant time and effort against it. Contact me if you want to know more.