YourPods Menu
You're at your desk, the episode you started on the walk in is still half-finished, and playing it means finding the app, waiting for a window, and hunting for where you stopped.
Your queue, and your place in it, one click from the menu bar.
YourPods Menu is a small Mac app that lives in your menu bar. Click it to see what you're listening to and what's next, and press play — no window, no Dock icon, no app to go and find.
Start on your phone, finish on your Mac.
Your queue comes from your YourPods Pro account, so the episode you started on your phone is already at the top of the panel — at the position you left it. Press play and it picks up where you stopped, rather than starting over.
Your place travels both ways
Play an episode here and YourPods Menu writes your position every 15 seconds, and sends it immediately when you pause instead of waiting for the next tick.
Finished here is finished everywhere
Finish an episode and it is marked played and leaves Up Next. Skip one and it goes back to the top. Both land on your phone.
One definition of finished
The same near-the-end rule applies on Mac, iPhone and the web player, with the threshold from your account — rather than three apps quietly disagreeing about when you are done.
A bad network does not sign you out
A flaky connection, a rate limit or an outage leaves your session alone. Only the server actually rejecting it signs you out.
The menu bar item is yours to shape.
Show the episode title, a running time, both, or neither. Settings draws a live preview of the real item that redraws as you change it, so you are not guessing.
Three presets, then the details
Start from Minimal, Title, or Everything, then adjust underneath: maximum width, scroll speed, bar thickness, how many bars, whether to match the menu bar's text size, and where it sits.
No Save button
Every change saves as you make it. Restore Defaults puts the page back the way it shipped.
The time, your way
The running time can show elapsed, remaining, elapsed and total, or nothing at all.
It rests.
A scrolling title reads itself three times after each play, each pause and each new episode, then parks at its beginning. Measured with a long title and nothing playing: about 14% of a CPU while it scrolls, 0.0% once it parks. Under Settings → Title → Keep scrolling you can choose 3 times (the default), While hovered, or Always.
Nothing animates on a screen nobody can see. The bar stops when the display sleeps and when the Mac is locked, and picks up where it left off on wake.
One click, and there it is.
Click the item and a panel opens: a one-line Now Playing header with a hairline progress rule, a transport cluster beside it — back, play/pause, forward — and your Up Next queue underneath.
Keys, not just clicks
Move through the queue with the arrow keys and press Enter or Space to play. r refreshes Up Next, Esc closes. Clicking away or switching apps dismisses it.
⌃⇧Y from any app
Worth knowing: a crowded menu bar can hide the icon without warning, and macOS gives you no indication when it does. The shortcut opens the panel anyway — no permission prompt, no Accessibility access.
Over full screen, too
The panel appears above another app's full-screen space, so you do not have to leave what you are doing to change what you are hearing.
It works with what your Mac already has.
Control Center, the Now Playing menu bar item, media keys and AirPods transport all drive it. Option-click the menu bar item to play or pause without opening the panel.
Your skip intervals, already set
Skip forward and back use the same intervals you set in the YourPods app — change them on your phone and this Mac follows, in the buttons, their glyphs, and what Control Center draws. They are shown read-only under Settings → Syncing. Until the Mac has seen your profile it uses 30 seconds forward and 15 back, matching every other YourPods client.
In the Dock only if you want it
Show YourPods Menu in the Dock (Settings → General) is off until you turn it on — live, no relaunch, and it brings a real app menu with it.
Honest about login items
Open YourPods Menu at login reads its state from the system rather than from our own belief, so revoking it in System Settings is reflected here truthfully.
Deliberately small.
Now Playing, Up Next, playback and sync. That is the whole app, and we intend to keep it that way.
It does not browse, search, subscribe or unsubscribe, and it cannot add an episode to your queue — Up Next is built on another YourPods client, usually the iOS app or the web player, and this is where you play it. There is no playback speed control and no sleep timer. It streams, and never downloads.
Volume, AirPlay and artwork are already drawn by Control Center, so we did not rebuild them.
It talks to one server, about three things.
YourPods Menu talks to YourPods Pro and nothing else, and only for your queue, your profile and your playback position. Reads are cached for 45 seconds and identical simultaneous requests are collapsed into one, because the rate limit is shared with every YourPods app on your network.
Your password is never stored
It is read from the sign-in field, sent straight to the sign-in request, and cleared. Never written to disk, never put in an environment variable, never placed in a URL. Only the tokens that come back are stored, in the macOS Keychain, in the app's own access group — and signing out deletes them outright.
Nothing in the log identifies you
No email address, token or password is ever written to it, and anything derived from your account is marked private.
Sandboxed, with nothing else in it
The app is sandboxed, uses HTTPS and the system Keychain and nothing else, and ships with no third-party packages. It streams, so no episode audio is cached to disk.
Before you uninstall, sign out in the app first. Your credential lives in a data-protection access group, and nothing you run afterwards will reach it.
What it needs.
macOS 26 (Tahoe) or later
The panel and the menu bar item are built on what macOS 26 provides.
Apple Silicon
There is no Intel build.
A YourPods Pro account
Up Next is the one Pro-only sync — a gPodder or Nextcloud server carries your subscriptions and listening positions, which is what the gPodder protocol covers, but it does not carry a queue. YourPods Menu is driven entirely by Up Next, so it needs the account that has one.
No window, no Dock icon
Unless you ask for one. It is a menu bar app; that is the whole of it.
Questions, answered.
Is this the YourPods app?
No. It is a separate Mac app you install on its own. The YourPods app is where you browse, subscribe and build your queue; YourPods Menu is where you play it from the menu bar.
Do I need to buy it?
The app itself is a free download, but it is not free to use. It needs a YourPods Pro account to do anything at all, because it reads your Up Next queue and that is the one sync Pro provides.
Does the $4.99 app include it?
No — they are separate products. The $4.99 purchase covers the YourPods app and every feature in it, exactly as it always has. YourPods Menu is free, and needs Pro for your queue.
Can I add episodes from the menu bar?
No. Build your queue in the YourPods app or the web player; YourPods Menu plays what is in it.
Why is the icon light when my Mac is in dark mode?
On macOS 26 the menu bar takes its vibrancy from your wallpaper, so the item follows the menu bar rather than the app's Appearance setting. The panel follows your choice.
Get the beta
Version 26.8 is in beta. Download it directly, or join through TestFlight to get new builds as they land. Either way you need macOS 26 or later on Apple Silicon, and a YourPods Pro account to play anything.