Your Mac stays your Mac

The short version

Gyre is a radial app switcher for macOS. Everything it does — showing the ring, moving between apps and windows, the hub actions — happens on your Mac. Nothing about what you are doing on screen is recorded, analyzed, or sent anywhere.

Gyre does contact one server of its own: a license check. It sends a license key and a per-install identifier, and nothing else. That is the only outbound request the app ever makes on its own behalf, and the rest of this page is about it.

What Gyre does on your Mac

Gyre watches for the modifier key you hold (Option by default), draws a ring of running apps at your cursor, and switches for you when you release. To do that it needs the Accessibility permission — reading window positions and moving focus between apps is what that permission is for.

The optional live window previews need the Screen Recording permission as well, because showing a live image of another window is what that permission governs. Previews are off until you turn them on, and you can revoke the permission at any time in System Settings.

Your settings, shortcuts and language are stored in your Mac's preferences. They stay on your Mac.

The license check

Gyre is sold with a one-time license key rather than a subscription, so the app has to be able to answer one question: is this key still valid? Answering it is the only reason the app talks to a server we run.

What is sent: the license key itself and a per-install instance id Gyre generates for this Mac. On activation, the instance also carries a display name — your Mac's local name plus a random suffix — so the device list in the license dashboard shows something recognisable you can unlink. Nothing else is transmitted. The request goes to our license proxy (a small Worker at gyre-license-proxy), which forwards it to Dodo Payments, our payment and licensing provider, and relays the answer back.

When it is sent: when you activate a key, when the app periodically re-checks that the key is still valid, and when you deactivate this Mac. The re-check needs the network; the rest of the app does not, and works offline.

What is never sent: which apps you run, which windows you switch to, what you drag into the hub, how often you use the app, or any usage statistics of any kind.

Purchases and email

Buying a license — and the checkout page it happens on — is handled entirely by Dodo Payments as merchant of record. Your payment details, your email address, and the record of the transaction are theirs, under their privacy policy. License keys are delivered by email after checkout.

The app itself only ever sees the key. It never asks for an email address, and there is no account to sign into.

Updates

Gyre has no built-in updater, so the app itself never checks for new versions. When you download one, you get it from the project's GitHub Releases page — an ordinary download of a file you asked for.

This website

This site is a static website. It runs no analytics scripts and sets no tracking cookies. It is hosted on Cloudflare Pages, which may keep standard access logs (such as IP addresses) as part of its hosting service.

Where this page comes from

This is a plain-language description of how Gyre behaves, and the behaviour it describes ships with the app. Gyre is source-available under a custom licence, and is an independent reimplementation of the Orbit concept by Yuze Pan.

If a release ever changes what the app sends, the change ships with that release and is noted in the release notes on GitHub.