Your glucose,
one glance away.
LibreBar puts your FreeStyle Libre reading in the Mac menu bar — live number, trend arrow, and a 12-hour chart. Native, private, and always there.
Free · macOS 14 or later · Apple Silicon & Intel
Everything you need.
Nothing you don't.
LibreBar does one job with care: keep your current glucose where your eyes already are.
Always in the menu bar
Your latest reading and trend arrow — in mg/dL or mmol/L — refreshed every minute. A stale-data marker tells you the moment the numbers stop being current.
12-hour chart
Click for a full picture: your target range — set your own numbers in Settings — shaded in green, and any stretch below it drawn in red.
Desktop widgets
Small, medium, and large widgets keep glucose on your desktop. They mirror the menu bar within a minute, automatically.
Alerts you choose
Optional notifications when glucose crosses your low or high threshold, or when readings stop arriving. Off by default, and honest: a heads-up while you work, not a medical alarm.
Zero upkeep
Launch at Login keeps LibreBar always running, and the app tells you when a new version is out — you'll never need to check back here.
Native, all the way down
SwiftUI, Swift Charts, and WidgetKit. It looks and behaves like part of macOS because it's built from exactly what macOS is built from.
Widgets for every desktop.
Three sizes, one source of truth. The large widget carries the full story: reading, chart, and 12-hour stats.
Pictures show invented sample readings, never a real person's glucose.
How it works.
Macs can't talk to Libre sensors directly — no NFC, no sensor pairing. LibreBar reads your data through Abbott's LibreLinkUp sharing service, the same one family members use to follow a loved one's glucose.
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Share from LibreLink
In the LibreLink app on your phone, connect LibreLinkUp and invite yourself. Your phone keeps uploading readings as it already does.
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Accept in LibreLinkUp
Sign in to the LibreLinkUp app with your follower account and accept the invitation. That account is what LibreBar uses.
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Sign in to LibreBar
Enter the LibreLinkUp account in LibreBar once. Your password goes to the macOS Keychain, and readings appear within a minute.
On the roadmap: LibreLinkUp accounts that follow more than one person. Today LibreBar shows the first connection on the account; a future version will let you choose which one to follow, and switch between them.
Private by architecture, not by promise.
- Keychain only. Your credentials live in the macOS Keychain — never in files, preferences, or logs.
- Two destinations, both yours to see. Glucose data flows only between your Mac and Abbott's LibreView servers. Once a day the app also fetches a tiny version file from librebar.app to tell you about updates — nothing about you is sent. Our server counts those requests in aggregate to estimate how many copies are running; nothing identifying is stored. No analytics scripts, no telemetry, no third parties.
- Sandboxed. The app runs in the macOS App Sandbox with network-client access and nothing more.
- Local first. Readings are cached only to feed your widgets, on your Mac, in the app's own container.
LibreBar is not a medical device. It is a convenience display for data your FreeStyle Libre system already collects. Never use it for treatment decisions — confirm with the LibreLink app or your reader.
FreeStyle Libre, LibreLink, LibreLinkUp, and LibreView are trademarks of Abbott. LibreBar is an independent project, not affiliated with or endorsed by Abbott, and uses the unofficial LibreLinkUp API.
Get LibreBar.
LibreBar is free, native, and notarized by Apple. Download it, drop it in Applications, and sign in with your LibreLinkUp account.
Download LibreBar Set up LibreLinkUp first
Version 1.5.2 · 2 MB · notarized · updates install themselves
Requires macOS 14 Sonoma or later, a FreeStyle Libre sensor, the LibreLink phone app, and a LibreLinkUp follower account.
Questions, ideas, or something not working? Email Bruce — LibreBar is built by one person who checks it every day, and hearing from someone else who does is the best part.
What's new.
Straight from the app's own release notes — the same words the update dialog shows.
LibreBar 1.5.2 September 2026
- Alerts no longer fire on old readings. When your Mac wakes up, the first reading LibreBar receives can be hours old. It used to treat that as news and could announce a low from the middle of the night. Now it tells you that readings have stopped, which is what is actually happening.
- The Stale badge now appears while the panel is open. Before, the timestamp beside it counted upward but the badge itself only showed up after you closed and reopened the panel.
- Widgets show the stale warning on time. They could be a full interval late, which mattered most when LibreBar was not running to correct them.
- Your low and high alert levels stay where you put them. They start out matching your target range, but changing that range no longer moves an alert level you never touched.
Earlier releases
LibreBar 1.5.1 August 2026
- Fixed the widgets briefly showing a made-up glucose curve. While macOS loaded the real reading, after a restart or an update, it drew the sample data used in the widget gallery, which looked like a real trace. The widgets now show your own readings while loading, or say plainly that there is nothing yet.
LibreBar 1.5 August 2026
- A new app icon, built for macOS Tahoe. It is drawn in layers instead of as one flat picture, so macOS gives it real depth and lighting and adapts it for the dark, clear, and tinted looks. On older versions of macOS it simply looks like a cleaner version of the old icon.
LibreBar 1.4.4 August 2026
- You can now choose how old a reading has to be before LibreBar warns you about it. Pick anywhere from 5 to 60 minutes in Settings, under Glucose. It used to be fixed at 15. The widgets and the readings-stopped alert follow the same number. Thanks to the reader who asked for this.
LibreBar 1.4.3 August 2026
- A simpler gear menu: just Settings and Quit. Everything else moved into Settings. Updates now live under General, where you can also see and change whether updates install themselves, and a new About pane holds What's New, Send Feedback, and the fine print.
LibreBar 1.4.2 August 2026
- Send Feedback. The gear menu can open an email to Bruce with your app version and macOS version already filled in. The sign-in screens carry the same link, for when trouble starts before you can even sign in.
- LibreBar now notices when it is running from Downloads or the Desktop, where macOS quietly blocks apps from updating themselves. It explains the fix up front instead of failing later with a confusing installer error.
LibreBar 1.4.1 August 2026
- Fixed the chart's time labels turning into cut-off dates like "Aug 8 at 1..." whenever the 12-hour window crossed midnight, which was every night. The labels now show just the hour, in the large widget and the panel alike.
LibreBar 1.4 August 2026
- Glucose alerts. LibreBar can notify you when glucose goes below or above levels you choose, and when readings stop arriving. Everything stays off until you turn it on. This is a heads-up while you work, not a medical alarm: alerts only arrive while LibreBar is running and your Mac is awake. Your phone is still the alarm device.
- You can set your own target range. The green band on every chart, the in-range figure, and the widgets all follow your numbers right away.
- Settings has a sidebar now, with General, Glucose, Alerts, and Account.
- Two small fixes: the dot on the chart honors the sensor's own low flag, and mmol/L values use your region's decimal separator.
LibreBar 1.3.6 August 2026
- The small desktop widget now shows the 12-hour trend line under the reading, like the bigger ones do, with the target band and red low coloring.
LibreBar 1.3.5 July 2026
- Fixed the stale-data warning in the menu bar. When LibreBar could not reach LibreLinkUp at all, the last reading kept showing with no warning sign, so it looked current while it quietly aged. The warning now appears on time no matter why the data stopped.
- Check for Updates is properly dimmed while a check is already running, and LibreBar stops retrying every minute if its saved password is removed from the Keychain.
LibreBar 1.3.4 July 2026
- LibreBar now tells you when an update is waiting: a dot beside the reading in the menu bar, and a row at the top of the panel you can click to install. Background update notices used to open behind whatever you were working in, where they could sit unseen for days.
LibreBar 1.3.3 July 2026
- Fixed a widget that came up blank and stayed blank. It waited 15 minutes before looking again, so the only cure was resizing it. It now tries again after a minute.
LibreBar 1.3.2 July 2026
- Fixed the widget freezing after an update. Updating replaces the app while the widget is still running the old copy, so it kept showing an old reading while LibreBar was fetching new ones. LibreBar now wakes it on the first launch after an update.
- What's New: the gear menu shows what changed in this version and the ones before it.
LibreBar 1.3.1 July 2026
- Preferences moved out of the gear menu into a Settings window, with room for the target range and alerts still to come.
- Settings now shows which LibreLinkUp account is signed in. The panel never said.
- Signing out asks first. It deletes the saved password, and you cannot undo that without typing the password again.
LibreBar 1.3 July 2026
- LibreBar updates itself. Signed, notarized updates arrive in the background and install with one click.
LibreBar 1.2.1 July 2026
- Fixed polling stopping after a network blip or after your Mac woke from sleep. Readings now resume on their own.
LibreBar 1.2 July 2026
- Desktop widgets: current reading, chart, and 12-hour statistics.
- Sign-in moved to its own window so password AutoFill works.
LibreBar 1.1 June 2026
- A Launch at Login setting, and a large widget with the chart and 12-hour statistics.
LibreBar 1.0 June 2026
- The first release: your FreeStyle Libre reading in the menu bar, with a trend arrow and a 12-hour chart.
If something's not working.
The short list of things that have actually gone wrong, and what fixes them.
Updates fail with an installer error
LibreBar needs to live in your Applications folder to update itself — macOS quietly blocks self-updating for apps running from Downloads or the Desktop. Quit LibreBar, drag LibreBar.app into Applications, and open it from there. Recent versions warn you about this at launch, so if you saw that message, this is the fix it meant.
The widget is blank, but the menu bar shows my glucose
The app is fine — macOS's widget system is holding an outdated record of where the app lives, which happens when the app has been moved between folders. Make sure exactly one copy of LibreBar.app exists, in Applications, then restart your Mac. Waiting doesn't fix this one; the restart does.
The menu bar shows a ⚠︎ next to the reading
That's LibreBar being honest: the newest reading is older than your stale-warning threshold (15 minutes unless you've changed it in Settings → Glucose), so the number on screen may not be current. Usually the phone running LibreLink is out of range of the sensor or offline — check that app first. The warning clears itself as soon as fresh readings arrive.
Something else
Use Send Feedback inside LibreBar (the gear menu → Settings → About) — it starts an email with your app version already filled in, which is half the diagnosis. Or just email Bruce. LibreBar is built by one person; real reports get real answers.
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