wtf is wattcher?

Wattcher is a native Mac menu bar app that watches which processes are draining your CPU, memory, and battery, and which processes are listening on network ports. It learns what normal activity looks like for your specific machine over time and then flags anomalies that stand out from that baseline, letting you review, ignore, or quietly quit the offending process. The developer is upfront that macOS does not give regular apps access to Activity Monitor's true energy usage numbers, so Wattcher estimates battery impact from CPU and memory behavior rather than measuring actual watts. You install it by downloading a disk image from GitHub Releases and dragging the app into your Applications folder. Once running, it checks your system on a schedule you choose, anywhere from every ten minutes to every eight hours, or you can trigger a check manually. It reads your battery status, looks at every process you own, and matches open network ports back to the process that owns them, then shows all of this in a searchable list with CPU use, memory use, estimated impact, and file location. From there you can open a port in your browser, copy its address, jump to its files in Finder, or safely quit the process, with extra identity checks run right before anything is shut down to make sure the tool is not signaling the wrong process. To avoid false alarms, Wattcher waits for a warm up period before it starts alerting, and requires unusual CPU or memory activity to show up in two checks in a row before flagging it, with fairly high thresholds designed to keep the number of alerts low. It never sends your data anywhere: everything stays on your Mac, with a small rolling history of recent findings kept locally for at most a day. Building it yourself requires macOS 14 or newer and Xcode 16 or newer, using Swift's own test and build tooling along with included shell scripts to produce an installable app bundle or disk image. The project is open source and does not require special system permissions or a privileged background helper, though it does need broad enough access to inspect other processes and network ports, which means it cannot run inside the sandboxed Mac App Store environment.