Privacy Policy
Last updated: October 21, 2026
Bromehew is a Mac app for working with Homebrew. We, Appnö GmbH, receive no data from you through it: Bromehew has no accounts, no tracking, no usage analytics and no crash reporting. This policy describes which connections the app makes and what is transferred to whom.
Controller
Appnö GmbH, Erkrather Str. 401, 40231 Düsseldorf, Germany
Managing Director: Klaus Rodewig
Email: info@appnoe.de
Homebrew package catalog
So that you can search packages and see the most popular ones, Bromehew downloads the public catalogs and statistics of the Homebrew project from formulae.brew.sh. As with any web request, the server receives your IP address and the identifier "Bromehew (macOS)". Bromehew sends no cookies and no information about you or your packages. The data is cached in your user folder. Without a connection, Bromehew uses the catalog of your local Homebrew installation.
formulae.brew.sh is run by the Homebrew project and hosted by GitHub, Inc. (USA). The legal basis is Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR: our legitimate interest is to show you a current package catalog.
Bromehew updates
Bromehew uses the software framework Sparkle to check regularly whether a new version is available and downloads it when you choose to. For this it fetches a file from raw.githubusercontent.com and the new version from github.com. Your IP address and the versions of Bromehew and Sparkle are transferred. Bromehew does not send a system profile of your Mac.
The servers are operated by GitHub, Inc., 88 Colin P. Kelly Jr. Street, San Francisco, CA 94107, USA. GitHub is certified under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework. Details are in GitHub's privacy statement. The legal basis is Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR: our legitimate interest is to provide you with security and bug fixes. You can turn the automatic check off in Bromehew › Settings › General.
Homebrew
Bromehew runs the Homebrew program (brew) on your Mac. Homebrew downloads packages and updates itself, among others from GitHub, and collects anonymous usage statistics unless you have turned them off. This is processing by the Homebrew project, not by us. You can turn the statistics off in Bromehew under Maintenance › Analytics. Details are in Homebrew's documentation.
Administrator password
When a Homebrew command needs administrator rights, Bromehew asks for your password in a macOS window and hands it directly to sudo. The password is not stored, not logged and not transferred.
Data on your Mac
Bromehew stores its settings, a cache of the package catalog and a lock file in your user folder. The log of Homebrew commands stays in memory until you quit the app or save it yourself. Notifications and opening at login are managed by macOS; you decide about them in System Settings. This data does not leave your Mac. You delete it by removing Bromehew, for example with brew uninstall --zap --cask appnoe/bromehew/bromehew.
Links
Links in Bromehew, for example to appnoe.de or the Homebrew documentation, open your browser. The privacy policies of their operators apply to those pages.
Your rights
Under the GDPR you have the right of access, rectification, erasure and restriction of processing, the right to data portability and the right to object to processing based on legitimate interests. Contact info@appnoe.de. As we receive no data through Bromehew, we can usually only confirm that we hold nothing about you.
You can also lodge a complaint with a data protection supervisory authority. The authority responsible for us is the Landesbeauftragte für Datenschutz und Informationsfreiheit Nordrhein-Westfalen (data protection commissioner of North Rhine-Westphalia).
Changes
We update this policy when Bromehew changes. The current version is in the app and on appnoe.de.