Blog · · By Matt Senter
A Little Rain. No Permissions Required.
An app that makes it rain on your desktop shouldn’t need access to your private life. Weatherling doesn’t ask to record your screen, read your documents, or monitor your typing. It adds a little weather to your Mac without permission prompts or personal data collection.
But when you see rain collecting on a window and disappearing behind another, it’s reasonable to wonder: how does it know what’s on your screen?
Window geometry, not window contents
Weatherling uses the geometry of your windows: their positions, sizes, and which ones are in front of others. macOS makes that basic layout information available without requiring access to the contents of your screen.
That’s enough to make rain interact with your desktop. A window’s edges tell the water where to collect and run off. Its position tells the rain where to disappear behind it. Move the window, and the effect follows.
None of that requires reading what’s inside. Weatherling doesn’t read window titles, inspect the page you’re browsing, or capture images of your desktop. It needs to know where the window is, not what you’re doing in it.
Nothing extra to authorize
There’s no Screen Recording request, no Accessibility access, and no permission to monitor your keyboard or control other apps. You don’t need to visit System Settings and decide whether a rain effect deserves access to something sensitive.
Weatherling runs within Apple’s App Sandbox. The effect works inside those restrictions, rather than asking you to relax them.
Your desktop stays yours
Everything the Mac app does happens locally. There’s no account, no tracking, and no personal data collected or transmitted. The app makes no network requests, and preferences such as rain intensity and wind stay in its sandboxed storage on your Mac.
A desktop decoration shouldn’t come with a privacy negotiation. Turn on the rain, adjust it to your mood, and get back to whatever you were doing. Weatherling doesn’t need to know what that is.
You can see the behaviour without installing anything on the home page, where the draggable windows are a browser illustration of the same idea. The full detail of what the app does and does not store is in the privacy policy, and the reasoning about why any of this is worth doing is in Why Rain on Your Desktop Can Feel Calming.