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SideClick is launching Mac-first
SideClick's first signed public release leads on macOS: a notarized universal app for Apple Silicon and Intel Macs, with signed automatic updates from day one. That is an unusual order of operations for practice software, which historically ships Windows-first and treats the Mac as an afterthought. This post explains the decision honestly — including the part that involves a code-signing bureaucracy problem.
What Mac users get
- A notarized .dmg — Gatekeeper-clean, no scary overrides to click through
- Signed automatic updates, verified on your machine before they install
- The full local-first practice: notes, scheduling, billing, PROMs and on-device AI
- Universal binary — Apple Silicon runs natively, not under translation
Notarization matters more for clinical software than for most categories. A practitioner installing an unsigned app is being trained to click through security warnings, and that is precisely the habit nobody handling patient records should rehearse. Leading with the platform where we can ship a fully clean install experience means the first thousand installs teach the right lesson.
iPhone and iPad, without the App Store
The clinician mobile app is a PWA: open your practice URL in Safari, add it to your home screen, and it works like an app — day sheet, notes, capture, offline support and end-to-end encrypted sync on Practice editions. No App Store listing stands between you and your own clinical tool, no store review cycle delays a fix, and no platform owner can remove your practice software from under you.
The trade-offs are real and worth stating: a PWA cannot use every native API, and installation is a two-tap ritual rather than a store search. For the mobile half of a clinician's day — the day sheet, the note at the kitchen table, the photo onto the chart — none of that costs anything. The desktop app remains where the full practice lives.
Where Windows stands
Windows builds ship today as an unsigned preview. They run the same code as the Mac release, but Windows will warn you at install, because we have not yet acquired a code-signing identity that satisfies SmartScreen. The blunt reason: the certificate authorities that anchor Windows trust make that process genuinely difficult for a small company in South Africa — a bureaucratic gap, not a technical one. We say so on the download page rather than hiding the warning behind a 'just click More Info' tutorial.
A signed Windows release follows. Until then the preview is exactly what it says: the full product, honestly labelled, for practices comfortable with the warning's real meaning.
Why lead with one platform at all
Because shipping one platform excellently beats shipping three apologetically. macOS notarization plus the PWA covers clinic desk and clinic corridor on Apple hardware end to end, with signing, updates and support all first-class. And because SideClick is local-first, the platform question is lower-stakes than it looks: your records live in your database on your machine, exportable in standard formats, whichever operating system you sit down at next.