Radio Silence — Mac download

Think of it as the practical flip side of Little Snitch. Where that tool asks for your attention constantly, Radio Silence is a set-and-forget firewall that simply cuts off internet access for the apps you select.

Runs Natively on Apple Silicon and Intel

Radio Silence 3.4 runs on any Mac with macOS 10.15 or later, with native support for both Apple Silicon and Intel processors.

Pick the apps to silence

Use the Block Application button to choose any installed app. The app then appears in a clean list of blocked connections, with no menu bar icon added.

Remove a block when plans change

First days with Radio Silence

Start with two or three apps you already distrust. That keeps the block list short enough to reason about while you learn how the monitor behaves.

A few habits worth forming early:

• Block an app before its first launch, not after it has already phoned home once.
• Check the Firewall tab after installing anything new, especially free utilities and browser extensions with companion apps.
• Use the pause control when troubleshooting a sync issue. Ten minutes of paused firewall often answers the question faster than reading logs.
• Keep an eye on the connection list during the first hour after a macOS update. System services behave differently on a fresh boot.

Radio Silence does not add a menu bar icon, so the only way to confirm a block is working is to launch the silenced app and watch it fail to connect. That is the point, but it takes a moment to get used to.

No Packet Inspection, Just a Tiny Process Watching Connections

The most common question is whether the app slows down the Mac. It does not. The overhead is a small userspace process that watches connection attempts; it never routes traffic through a proxy or inspects packets.

Some people ask whether a blocked app knows it is blocked. Usually it just sees a failed connection, the same as if the Wi-Fi dropped. Most apps retry quietly and move on.

Another regular question: does Radio Silence block incoming connections too? Yes. The monitor lists both outgoing attempts and incoming connection requests, and a blocked app loses both directions.

People also ask about uninstalling. Removing the app restores normal networking for everything, though the block list itself lives inside the app, so deleting it removes your rules along with the tool.

And the question behind most radio silence mac searches: is there really no menu bar icon? Correct. The interface lives in a single window; the firewall does its work without a persistent presence.

Block a Weather Widget's Hidden Analytics

You install a new weather widget from a small developer. It works fine, but the connection list shows it reaching two analytics endpoints every ten minutes. You open Radio Silence, click the Block Application button, pick the widget from the list, and close the window.

The widget still runs. Its graphs update from cached data. Its network calls now fail silently.

A week later a utility you rely on stops syncing. You open the Firewall tab, find it in the blocked list, and remove it. Sync resumes within seconds. No reboot, no reconfiguration.

Before a flight, you pause the firewall for an hour while offline apps finish downloading their content, then turn it back on. The whole routine takes under a minute.

That is the shape of a normal session: open the window, make one change, close it. Radio Silence is not a dashboard you live in. It is a switch you flip when an app earns your distrust.

Remove any app from the block list and its internet access is restored immediately.

• New — Installation guidance for macOS Tahoe. Help view with troubleshooting information if the app fails to launch.
• Improved — Handling of installation errors and missing permissions.

• macOS 10.15 or later
• Apple Silicon or Intel 64-bit Mac