← control freak

For your Mac

The other half.

Control Freak on your phone talks to a small agent that lives in your Mac's menu bar. This is that agent. It is free, and it is the only thing you need to install on the computer.

Download for macOS

0.2.12 · 2.8 MB · macOS 14 or later · Apple silicon and Intel

One universal build. Nothing to choose between.

On a Windows PC? Get the Windows agent (beta).

Installing it

  1. Open the downloaded .dmg and drag Control Freak into Applications.
  2. Open it from Applications. macOS will refuse the first time — see below.
  3. Look for the Control Freak glyph in your menu bar, choose Pair a phone, and scan the code with the app.

macOS will block it the first time.

This build is not notarized by Apple, so macOS refuses to open it and says “Apple could not verify ‘Control Freak’ is free of malware”. Notarizing needs a paid Apple Developer account, which this project does not have yet.

Click Done, not Move to Trash. “Move to Trash” is the blue button, so it is the easy one to hit by reflex — and it deletes the app.

Then:

  1. Drag Control Freak from the disk image into Applications, if you have not already.
  2. Open it once, and let the warning appear. Click Done.
  3. Go to System Settings → Privacy & Security.
  4. Scroll to the Security section. There will be a line about Control Freak being blocked, with an Open Anyway button.
  5. Click it, then confirm with Touch ID or your password.

You only do this once. If you would rather clear it from the terminal:

xattr -d com.apple.quarantine "/Applications/Control Freak.app"

Updates

Control Freak updates itself: it checks in the background, and Check for updates in its menu asks right away. Updates it installs itself skip the “could not verify” warning above — that only happens on a first install.

Installed before 19 September 2026? Reinstall once.

Updating arrived in 0.2.11 on the Mac and 0.1.5 on Windows. Anything older has no updater, so it will never be offered a new version. Check the version at the bottom of the menu (Mac) or the tray menu (Windows); if it is older, download and install it again from this page. Your paired phones stay paired — the pairing key is kept on the computer, not inside the app.

For terminal sessions: tmux

Answering your agent from your phone runs on tmux, which macOS does not ship with. Everything else — clipboard, apps, media, volume — works without it, so it is easy to miss until you open a session and find nothing there. Install it once with Homebrew:

brew install tmux

If it is missing, the setup window says so the first time you open Control Freak, with that command ready to copy.

What it asks for, and why

It does not ask for your files, your microphone, or your camera, and it has no account to sign in to. Pairing is one scan of a QR code that carries the Mac's cryptographic fingerprint, which your phone pins from then on.

Windows (beta)

The same agent for Windows 10 and 11: it sits in the notification area, pairs with the same QR code, and drives the same deck — media, volume, clipboard, apps, terminal sessions in PowerShell, sleep, shutdown and restart. It is new, so expect rough edges.

Download for Windows

0.1.8 beta · 60 MB zip · Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit · nothing else to install

  1. Right-click the downloaded zip and choose Extract All.
  2. Open the extracted Control Freak folder and run ControlFreakAgent.exe. Keep the files together.
  3. Click the Control Freak icon in the notification area (near the clock), choose Pair a phone, and scan the code with the app.

Windows will warn you about it.

The agent is not code-signed yet, so your browser may say the file is not commonly downloaded, and Windows may show “Windows protected your PC”. Choose Keep in the browser, and More info → Run anyway in the Windows prompt. If Windows Security removes it, restore it from Windows Security → Protection history → Allow on device.

When the firewall asks, allow it on private networks, and make sure your Wi-Fi is set to Private. If phones cannot connect, the pairing window says so and offers a one-click fix.

To check the download, in PowerShell:

Get-FileHash $HOME\Downloads\ControlFreak-Windows-0.1.8.zip

70ed875c378bf3187b5f0e50e0aba118e93a96e50d0fb019273cceed390e5559

Verifying the Mac download

If you want to check the file is the one published here, compare its SHA-256:

shasum -a 256 ~/Downloads/ControlFreak-0.2.12.dmg

93c239f9df3067fd686459576a0744c21e9bb04f3f5d6e83effba2df3a67b02f