Introducing Glance Unlock: A Privacy-First App Locker for Mac
Most of the time, locking your entire Mac is overkill. Sometimes, you just want a little more privacy around a few specific apps. That is the idea behind Glance Unlock. Glance Unlock is a local-first macOS app that le
Most of the time, locking your entire Mac is overkill.
Sometimes, you just want a little more privacy around a few specific apps.
That is the idea behind Glance Unlock.
Glance Unlock is a local-first macOS app that lets you lock individual apps and unlock them with a quick face + blink check.
No cloud processing. No analytics. No saved camera photos or video.
Everything happens on your Mac.
Why I Built It
I wanted something between two extremes:
- leaving every app open and accessible
- locking the entire Mac every time I step away
There are plenty of situations where you may want an extra privacy layer around a specific app without interrupting your entire workflow.
That could be:
- Notes
- messaging apps
- work tools
- finance apps
- personal projects
- anything else you would rather not leave immediately accessible
Glance Unlock is my attempt at making that interaction feel lightweight.
You open a protected app, look at the camera, blink, and continue working.
The Main Idea: Local-First Privacy
The most important design decision behind Glance Unlock was keeping the authentication flow local.
Face detection and blink verification happen on-device.
Glance Unlock does not upload your camera feed to a server, save photos or video, or rely on cloud-based face recognition.
The goal is simple:
Your face should not need to leave your Mac just to unlock an app on your Mac.
Privacy is not an optional feature here. It is part of how the app is designed.
How It Works
The flow is intentionally simple.
- Choose the apps you want to protect.
- Open one of those apps.
- Glance Unlock checks for your face.
- Blink to confirm that you are actually present.
- The app is unlocked.
You can also use Touch ID or your macOS password as a fallback through macOS.
Glance Unlock lives in the menu bar, so it stays out of the way when you are not using it.
You can also decide when protected apps should relock.
The goal is to keep the extra security step useful without making your Mac annoying to use.
Why the Blink?
Face detection by itself is not enough for the experience I wanted.
Adding a blink gives Glance Unlock a simple presence check.
Instead of only detecting that a face exists in front of the camera, the app asks for a small action from the person using the Mac.
It is intentionally lightweight.
Look at the camera.
Blink.
Continue working.
What Glance Unlock Is Not
Glance Unlock is currently an early privacy-layer prototype.
It is not a replacement for Apple Face ID, FileVault, your Mac login password, or the macOS lock screen.
It also does not provide the same security guarantees as system-level authentication.
If Glance Unlock is quit, its app protection stops.
I think this distinction is important.
The project is designed to add another layer of privacy around selected apps, not pretend to replace security features built directly into macOS.
Built for Apple Silicon
The current version of Glance Unlock is designed for:
Apple silicon Macs running macOS 26 or newer.
The project is still evolving, so compatibility and behavior may change as I keep improving it.
Current preview builds are also not Apple-notarized yet, so installation requires following the instructions provided with the project.
What I Learned Building It
One of the most interesting parts of this project was realizing how much UX matters for security tools.
A security feature can technically work perfectly and still be frustrating if it interrupts the user too often.
The difficult part is balancing:
- privacy
- speed
- reliability
- false detections
- relock behavior
- fallback authentication
- user control
For something like Glance Unlock, the authentication itself is only part of the problem.
The real challenge is making the protection feel almost invisible until you actually need it.
That is still something I am experimenting with.
Where I Want to Take It
There are a lot of directions I could explore next.
Better relock rules, improved detection, stronger system integration, better onboarding, and more control over how individual apps are protected are all areas I am thinking about.
But before adding too much, I want to understand how people actually use it.
That feedback matters more than adding a long list of features.
Try Glance Unlock
You can check out Glance Unlock here:
https://glance-unlock.vercel.app/
If you try it, I would especially love to know:
Which Mac app would you protect first?
And if something feels slow, confusing, unnecessary, or broken, tell me that too.
Glance Unlock is still early, and that is exactly why feedback is useful right now.
Originally published by Dev.to Security. Aggregated on AIWithGhost for educational purposes — full credit and traffic to the original publisher.