Little Snitch: Network Monitor and Application Firewall for macOS

Honestly the whole UI thing was overblown. It's a great Electron app, and their macOS app was always a little iffy (old AppKit oddities). The port unlocked: Linux, a fully featured Windows client, noticeably faster improvements (Watchtower, family sharing, improved SSH and CLI support), and seems to have allowed for much better apps on iOS and Android, all at likely no user cost.

Then every 3 years or so you spent $300 again to get the updated version. It was a much better system!

/s

In that time, there have been 6 major versions of Little Snitch.

macOS has undergone pretty major architectural changes during that time, necessitating mandatory upgrades under some circumstances, but an OS update does not always force a LS upgrade.

> When there’s a new mandatory paid upgrade every couple years then it’s not far from a subscription service.

I disagree and don’t think people should mentally model subscriptions this way.

Subscriptions almost universally cost more on average than standalone purchases did, and there are still situations where it’s possible to remain on old versions in perpetuity, e.g. and old Mac that is kept around for a specific purpose but no longer receives major OS updates.

I think both models fall under a larger overarching umbrella of “software maintenance costs”, but those costs have always existed and standalone purchases vs. subscriptions are two fairly different ways of covering those costs.

Agree that this all feels worse on macOS due to the regular updates, but unlike Windows, I actually feel better over time about privacy/security and this naturally forces more app updates across the board. Microsoft’s commitment to backward compatibility is both convenient and increasingly a liability.

I don’t know how to monitor energy use, and if I have time, I will look it up.

For me, one app which not only notifies, also shows me where its connecting is a big advantage.

2. The reason tools like Little Snitch are valuable is they instantly indicate that a connection was attempted, indicate which binary/app attempted it, and allow you to decide whether or not to allow the connection in realtime

Being able to associate a specific action you’re taking (e.g. clicking a button in a specific app) with a specific network request isn’t really feasible when the device keeping track is not the device you’re currently using.

It’s significantly harder to retroactively analyze connections once you’ve completely lost the context of what initiated the connection.

The only way to make a centralized device achieve the same thing is to institute a default-deny policy, but carefully allowing only the connections you want becomes tedious and quickly leads to just giving up for practical reasons.