System Tray / Menu Bar App

The system tray (Windows and Linux) and menu bar (macOS) are the small icon strips where apps live persistently, outside any window. A tray app can stay running after its windows close, show status at a glance, and be one click away all day.

This is the single clearest capability gap between web and desktop: a browser tab dies when it's closed, while a tray app keeps syncing, listening, and notifying in the background. It's why chat, monitoring, and productivity tools are so much stickier as desktop apps, a gap explored in what web apps can't do.

macOS menu bar icons have their own convention: template images, monochrome shapes the OS recolors for light and dark menu bars, so a colored logo that looks fine on Windows reads as wrong on a Mac. Icon sizing and per-platform behavior differ too, detailed in our tray icon guide.

Deskifier lets you configure trays visually, icon, menu, left and right click behaviors, macOS template mode, without writing native code, and your web app can drive them through the SDK.