Help & documentation
How Anomalous watches your Mac — what it measures and why, how it decides something is wrong, and how to get the most out of it. Everything here is drawn straight from how the app actually works.
Start here
- What Anomalous is Anomalous watches your Mac quietly and, when something is genuinely wrong, tells you in plain language what it is, whether it is normal, and the one safe thing to do.
- Install & first run Download the signed, notarized app, drag it in, and let it learn your Mac. Optionally enable system-wide monitoring via the privileged helper.
How it works
- How it works: detect → judge → act → show The pipeline behind every card: measure everything, judge it against your own baseline on-device, resolve what the process is, and only then surface a plain-language verdict with a safe action.
- What we measure, and why Anomalous samples roughly a dozen live dimensions per process every tick — CPU, real memory, energy with a P/E-core split, disk I/O, wakeups, GPU, network, Neural Engine, temperature and power — at a fraction of a percent of CPU.
- How your baseline is learned There is no global "too much CPU" number. Anomalous learns what is normal for your Mac using robust statistics, so a flag means "unusual for you," not "above an arbitrary line."
- What we inspect, and why When a process misbehaves, Anomalous resolves what it actually is through a layered loop — your on-device corpus, an on-device identity model, then an anonymous research lookup — always failing safe to "unknown" rather than guessing.
- Safety tiers & safe actions Every verdict carries a safety tier and, at most, one suggested action Anomalous is confident is safe — or none at all. It never proposes something destructive on a guess.
- The three AI tiers AI never decides something is wrong — it only explains verified facts. Explanations escalate from an on-device model, to Private Cloud Compute, to paid cloud triage, in that order.
Features
- The ambient widget A desktop or Notification Center widget that shows your Mac’s current behavior at a glance — calm when all is well, and the active anomaly when there is one.
- Siri, Spotlight & Shortcuts Ask your Mac out loud or from Spotlight whether it is behaving, and wire Anomalous into Shortcuts and automations with App Intents.
- Notifications & “normal for me” Anomalous notifies sparingly, only for confirmed high-confidence anomalies, and learns when you say “this is normal for me” so it stops telling you twice.
Discovery & data
- The discovery engine When the fleet flags a process no one has documented yet, an anonymous lookup researches it, a verifier checks the sources, and — only if it holds up — it becomes a signed corpus entry everyone benefits from.
- The public corpus (contribute) The process-identity corpus is an open, PR-able data repository. Browse it, correct it, and add entries — every improvement grounds cards for the whole fleet.
Trust
- Privacy & what leaves your Mac Detection and judgment happen entirely on-device. Nothing identifiable leaves your Mac by default, discovery lookups are anonymous, and the client is open source so you can read exactly what is sent.
- The root helper System-wide monitoring uses a small privileged helper. It is optional, tightly scoped, cryptographically pinned to the app, and refuses to touch protected processes.
Account
- Accounts, tokens & Get Help Create an account to use paid cloud triage. Fund a prepaid balance, connect the app with a per-machine token, and spend credits only when you ask for help.
- Frequently asked questions Short, direct answers to the questions people ask most about Anomalous — cost, privacy, safety, requirements, and how it differs from other Mac tools.