Aerial Companion App for Mac

Aerial is the official companion app for the Aerial screen saver for macOS. It takes care of install, automatic updates and more.

This utility will install the Aerial screensaver and keep you up to date!

I thought Aerial had auto-updates with Sparkle?

Aerial used to automatically update (since version 1.5.0) using the Sparkle framework.

With the introduction of macOS 10.15 (Catalina), things changed for screen savers and Aerial was no longer able to update itself because of the new security restrictions introduced with sandboxing. A temporary workaround was put in place in version 1.8.0 where you could get notified of a new version but not automatically install.

While this worked most of the time, for some users, the update check caused the ScreenSaverEngine to lose the keyboard/mouse focus, and pressing a key would no longer let you exit the screen saver (pressing cmd-alt-shift-esc could be used as a workaround). This issue seems to trigger a lot more often in macOS 11 (Big Sur). Due to this, Sparkle was removed from Aerial starting in version 2.0.0 and native support was added using Aerial Companion.

How does it work?

During your first launch you will be able to set up Aerial Companion to keep you up to date the way that you want. Choose whether it checks for an update hourly, daily, weekly, or only when you want to update manually. Run the companion app in the foreground from your menubar, or in the background without any effort from you. Stay up to date with either stable releases or beta updates.

Note: While the software is classified as free, it is actually donationware. Please consider making a donation to help support development.