Hands Off! for Mac in 2026: Discontinued, and What to Use Instead

Hands Off! (by Metakine) was one of the early Mac privacy tools, and it did two jobs in one app:

• Outbound network control. It watched which apps tried to connect to the internet, asked you, and saved your answers as rules.
• Disk access monitoring. It watched which apps read, wrote or deleted files, and could alert you when an app touched files or folders you had protected.

That combination was unusual. Most Mac firewalls, then and now, handle only the network side. For people who wanted one tool watching both the network and the file system, Hands Off! was a sensible choice for years.

The facts, as of September 2026:

• The last version is 4.4.3, released on 15 October 2020.
• The app is listed as no longer supported by its developer.
• The developer's website is no longer reachable.

What that means in practice: the last release came out before macOS 11 Big Sur and before the first Apple Silicon Macs (both November 2020), and nothing has shipped since. Over the same years, Apple has moved firewall software to its Network Extension framework. For a security tool that sits between your apps and the network, that means no fixes for new macOS versions and no one to ask when something breaks.

Our advice: if Hands Off! still runs on an older Mac of yours, plan the switch. On a current Mac, do not install it from third-party download sites; security software that can no longer be updated is not something we would put on a machine you rely on.

Hands Off! covered two jobs, and in 2026 they are replaced in different ways.

The disk half is largely covered by macOS itself. Under System Settings, Privacy & Security, macOS now gates app access to protected places such as Desktop, Documents and Downloads, Photos, Contacts and Full Disk Access, and apps must ask before they touch them. That is not the same as a live disk-write monitor, but it covers what most people used Hands Off!'s disk side for.

The network half needs a separate app. The built-in macOS firewall controls incoming connections only; it does not stop your own apps from sending data out to analytics and advertising servers. That outbound control is what most people used Hands Off! for, and it is exactly what the maintained firewalls below do.

All five of these are actively maintained. All five are network tools; none of them is built to watch disk writes the way Hands Off! did.

Little Snitch (Objective Development, version 6.5 from September 2026) is the closest match to how Hands Off! worked: in alert mode it asks about new connections and lets you allow or deny once, until quit, or forever. It adds a detailed network monitor with traffic history, DNS encryption and optional category blocklists you switch on yourself. Perpetual licence sold directly by the vendor, with a demo mode.

LuLu (Objective-See) is free and open source. It alerts on unknown outbound connections and saves your decision as a rule; block and allow lists can be loaded from a file or URL.

Radio Silence takes the opposite approach: no prompts at all. You keep a list of apps that may not go online, and a real-time monitor shows every connection. One-time purchase.

Vallum filters inbound and outbound connections with per-app rules and alerts, runs in userland without a kernel extension, and is at version 5.1 with 6.0 in beta. Paid, with a trial.

NetMute is a per-app firewall built around trackers rather than prompts. Tracker Shield blocks 300+ known tracker domains inside your apps automatically, App X-Ray gives each app a privacy grade based on what it actually contacts, and Quiet Mode records new connections instead of popping them up, so you decide the backlog in one pass. Free to download; Pro is a one-time purchase with no subscription and no account.

Which one replaces Hands Off! for you depends on how you want to work:

• You liked answering prompts and building rules: Little Snitch, or LuLu if you want free and open source.
• You want a few apps completely offline and nothing else: Radio Silence.
• You want trackers blocked without answering prompts, and to see what each app does: NetMute.

For most people who come looking for Hands Off! today, we recommend NetMute, because the job has changed: the connections worth stopping are mostly analytics and telemetry inside apps you still want to use. A real example from the developer's own Mac (7 to 22 September 2026): GeForce NOW contacted 59 domains, 2 of them tracking endpoints (feedbacks.telemetry.data.nvidia.com and events.telemetry.data.nvidia.com). NetMute blocked both without a prompt, and the app stayed online. Over 30 days on the same Mac, it stopped 2,701 tracker requests from 64 companies across 33 apps.

One honest caveat: NetMute does not replace Hands Off!'s disk monitoring; for that, rely on the macOS Privacy & Security permissions. Download NetMute free and look at what your apps connect to.