What Tend doesn't need
Tend reads the same system statistics and hardware sensors that Activity Monitor and System Information use. It doesn't ask for Full Disk Access, Accessibility, Screen Recording, your location, your camera or your microphone, and it doesn't install a background helper that runs as administrator.
Notifications
Tend's alerts are macOS notifications: low battery, charge level reached, battery warm while charging, CPU running hot, and an app draining your battery. Alerts are part of Tend Pro (free during the beta).
Tend asks for permission only when you choose to: with Turn on notifications during the welcome, or later with Turn on next to Notifications in Tend › Settings › About & support. macOS then asks once whether Tend may send notifications. If you click Don't Allow, alerts stay silent, and Settings shows a button that opens System Settings › Notifications.
To turn notifications on later: open System Settings › Notifications, choose Tend and switch on Allow notifications. You can choose banners or alerts there too.
To change which alerts Tend sends, and at what levels, open Tend › Settings › Alerts.
Files and folders
When Clean Up measures your Downloads, Documents or Desktop folders, or looks for an app's leftover files, macOS may ask whether Tend can access those folders or data from other apps. This is macOS protecting your files, and the prompt comes from macOS, not Tend.
- Allow lets Clean Up include those folders in its scan and its size map.
- Don't Allow is fine too. Tend skips what it can't read and still shows everything else.
To change your answer, open System Settings › Privacy & Security › Files & Folders, choose Tend, and switch folders on or off.
Scanning never changes anything. Files only move when you choose to move them to the Trash. How Clean Up keeps you safe.
Your administrator password
Startup items in your account, and helpers installed for all users, switch on and off without a password. Switching off a helper installed for all users turns it off for your account only. System services (daemons) need an administrator. For those, macOS shows its own password prompt, with Tend's reason for asking: which item it's turning on or off. Tend never sees your password. Because Tend asks macOS through a standard system tool, the prompt may also name that tool, osascript. If you cancel, nothing changes.
The Uninstaller doesn't ask for a password. Some apps installed by the App Store or an installer are protected by macOS; for those, Tend tells you to drag the app to the Trash in Finder, which can ask for your password itself.
Open at login
When you turn on Open at login in Tend's Settings, macOS adds Tend to your login items and may show a notification saying so. You'll also see Tend in System Settings › General › Login Items & Extensions, where you can switch it off too.
Keychain
If you use Tend Pro with a license key or an account, Tend stores the key, its license token and your sign-in session in your login keychain, under the name app.tend.license. macOS normally allows this without asking.
Network connections
Tend connects only to tendmac.app and api.tendmac.app: to check for app updates, to check whether the beta is still running, and for licenses and sign-in. If you use a firewall app such as Little Snitch, allow those two. Tend keeps working offline; Pro keeps working for a while too. What these connections contain.
The Updates page also runs Apple's softwareupdate and, if you have them, Homebrew and mas, which contact Apple and Homebrew as they normally would.