# A water reminder app for Mac, feature by feature A water reminder app for Mac keeps your daily hydration goal in the menu bar, logs a glass in one tap, and nudges you on a cadence you set rather than on a schedule someone else picked. - URL: https://swiftfox.studio/handbook/water-reminder-app-for-mac - About: https://swiftfox.studio/apps/aqumi - Published: 2026-07-23 - Updated: 2026-09-05 - Publisher: Swiftfox Studio (https://swiftfox.studio) ## In short - Aqumi's menu bar droplet carries a progress bar that fills toward the day's goal, so the state of your hydration is a glance rather than a screen. - Logging is one tap on a preset you shaped yourself, or Command Shift L from anywhere without opening a window. - Reminders run on your own interval, in notification or silent mode, and every banner carries Log, Snooze and Mute for today. - The goal comes from a short profile or from a number you type, and the whole log stays on your Mac - no HealthKit, no account, no sync. ## What a water reminder app actually has to do Two things, and they pull against each other. It has to interrupt you often enough that you notice you have not drunk anything since breakfast, and it has to cost so little attention that you never turn it off. Almost every app in this category fails the second half: it nags on a fixed schedule, it fires during meetings, and logging a glass takes four taps in a window you have to go and find. [Aqumi](https://swiftfox.studio/apps/aqumi) is the one this article walks through. It lives as a droplet in the macOS menu bar, keeps its log on the machine, and everything below is in the shipping version. ## The droplet in the menu bar The status item is the whole interface most days - that and the desktop widget further down. It is a droplet mark with a progress bar underneath it, and the bar fills as you get closer to the day's goal. There is no percentage to read and no number competing with the clock - the bar is either nearly empty at four in the afternoon, which tells you something, or it is not. Clicking it opens the popover. Pressing **Command Shift W** opens the same popover from anywhere on the Mac, and **Command Shift L** logs your last drink without opening anything at all. Both use Carbon hotkey registration, so Aqumi needs no Accessibility permission to make them work. ## Logging, in one tap or one keystroke Logging is the part that has to be nearly free, so the popover leads with it: a row of drink presets, each a name, a volume and an icon, sitting one tap away. ![The Aqumi popover in the macOS menu bar, showing the day's hydration total against the goal and a row of one-tap drink presets](https://swiftfox.studio/aqumi/listing/shot-1.jpg "The popover leads with the day's progress and the presets pinned to the quick-add row.") The presets are yours to shape. Aqumi seeds a few on first launch, and you add, edit, reorder and pin your own in Settings - a 250 ml glass, the 750 ml bottle on your desk, the coffee you were going to count anyway. Whichever ones you pin show up in the popover's quick-add row; the rest stay in the list a scroll away. Each preset carries a **hydration factor** alongside its volume, which is the detail that makes counting anything other than water honest. Water is 1.0, milk counts for 1.2, a sports drink 1.1, an energy drink 0.9 and a beer 0.75 - so a 500 ml beer moves the bar by 375 ml, and the app does not pretend otherwise. The defaults come from the Beverage Hydration Index, which is also why tea and coffee sit at 1.0 rather than below it: in that study they were not measurably worse than water. None of it is fixed - pick a drink type and the factor fills itself in, then move it anywhere between 0.5 and 1.5 in 5% steps. You can keep up to eight presets, anywhere from 50 to 2000 ml each, and pin as many of them as you want to the quick-add row. Nothing stops you pinning all eight; the row just stops being a row at that point, which is the argument for two or three. Units are metric or imperial, and the choice is a display concern rather than a data one, so switching does not rewrite your history. Logging does not always need the popover either. The status item's own menu carries **Add Glass (250 ml)** and **Add Bottle (500 ml)** outright, along with the snooze and mute-for-today entries, so the common case is one click and a menu item. ## The widget on the desktop The menu bar is not the only place Aqumi shows up. There is a desktop widget in two sizes, and it is there for the same reason the droplet is: the day you forget to drink is the day you never open the app. ![The Aqumi desktop widget in two sizes, showing the day's total against the goal, the week behind it and one-click quick-add buttons](https://swiftfox.studio/aqumi/listing/shot-4.jpg "Small is the reading; medium adds the week and three quick-add buttons.") The small card is the reading and nothing else - today's total against the goal, how far the bar has filled, and one quick-add button. The medium one adds the week behind you: seven columns with the days you hit the goal in green, the current streak under them, and three quick-add buttons instead of one. Pressing one logs that drink where you are standing. The app does not have to be running for the press to land - the drink waits in the container the two share and the app takes it up the next time it runs, while the widget counts it straight away rather than looking like nothing happened. One difference worth knowing: a widget follows the system language rather than the one you picked inside Aqumi, the way every other widget on the desktop does. ## Where the daily goal comes from You fill in a short profile once - weight, age, sex and activity level - and Aqumi turns it into a daily volume. If you already know your number, type it in and the profile stops mattering. That escape hatch is deliberate. The precise figure is the least important part of hydration tracking: the gap between a calculated 2.4 liters and the 2 liters you would have guessed changes nothing about your day, whereas noticing at 4pm that you have logged one glass changes it a lot. The goal exists to give the progress bar a top end, not to be medical advice. **Day starts at** decides when the counter resets, anywhere from 03:00 to 06:00. It is a small setting with one specific reader in mind: if you are still working at two in the morning, a log that rolled over at midnight has already split your night into two half-empty days. ## Reminders you can live with Reminders run on an interval you set - 90 minutes out of the box - in one of two modes: - **Notification**, the recommended one, posts a banner with a quick-log action on it. - **Silent** posts nothing at all and lets the menu bar droplet be the reminder, which is where people who dislike reminders end up. Notification is recommended for a reason worth naming: a droplet only works as a reminder if you look at it, and the day this app exists for is the day you do not. Silent is there so the app survives the week you cannot stand being interrupted, instead of being uninstalled during it. ![The Aqumi reminder settings, with the reminder cadence, the two reminder modes and the quiet hours range](https://swiftfox.studio/aqumi/listing/shot-3.jpg "Cadence, mode and quiet hours, which default to 23:00 through 08:00.") The banner carries its own actions, so responding to it never means opening the app. **Log** records a drink and dismisses. **Snooze 30 minutes** and **Snooze 1 hour** push the next one back. **Mute for today** stops them until tomorrow, which is the button that keeps the app installed - an app you cannot silence for an afternoon is an app you uninstall on the afternoon you needed to. Quiet hours cover the rest. They default to 23:00 through 08:00 and take a range of your own, so nothing arrives while you are asleep. On top of that, these are ordinary macOS notifications, so a Focus or Do Not Disturb schedule holds them back the way it holds back everything else - unless you say otherwise. **Interrupt in Do Not Disturb** and **Interrupt in fullscreen** are two separate switches, off by default, for the person whose working day is one long Focus session and who would otherwise never be reminded at all. ## What a month of it looks like The statistics screen answers the only question worth asking after a few weeks: is this actually working. ![The Aqumi statistics view with a weekly bar chart, the daily average, the goal-hit rate and the current streak](https://swiftfox.studio/aqumi/listing/shot-2.jpg "The week at a glance: daily average, goal-hit rate and streak, all computed from the local log.") There is a weekly bar chart, a 30-day trend and a streak counter for days you hit the goal. All of it is computed from a log stored on your Mac. Nothing is written to Apple Health, nothing is uploaded, and there is no account to create before the first glass. That last point is not a privacy flourish so much as a friction one. A hydration app that opens with a sign-up form is asking for more commitment than the problem deserves. ## What it deliberately does not do There is **no phone app and no sync**. Your log lives on one Mac, which is a real limitation and worth saying plainly: if you drink two liters away from your desk, Aqumi will not know. There is **no coaching layer** - no scores, no badges, no daily summary email, no gamification beyond the streak. The interesting number is whether the bar is full, and everything else would be padding around it. It asks for **one system permission**, notifications, and works without it in silent mode. No HealthKit, no location, no file access. The app is sandboxed, signed and notarised, and the only network traffic goes to our own servers - license checks, updates, config, and anonymous usage and crash diagnostics. ## What it costs, and what else to look at Aqumi runs on **macOS 14 or later**, on Apple Silicon and Intel, and takes about 25 MB. It is a **one-time $5.99 purchase** rather than a subscription, with a 30-day trial that needs no card and no email. The full specification is on [the Aqumi page](https://swiftfox.studio/apps/aqumi). Hydration is one of the three things a desk quietly costs you, and the other two have their own cadence. If your eyes ache by six and you sit for three hours without moving, that is [Recess](https://swiftfox.studio/apps/recess), which runs eye-rest and stretch timers on separate clocks, feature by feature in [a 20-20-20 rule app for Mac](https://swiftfox.studio/handbook/20-20-20-rule-app-for-mac). There is a wider look at both in [desk health apps for Mac](https://swiftfox.studio/blog/desk-health-apps-for-mac).