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Download Hard Stop

One disk image. Drag it to Applications, open it once, and give the password away.

Download for macOSVersion 1.0 · 1.6 MB · Apple silicon and Intel

Setting it up

  1. 01

    Drag Hard Stop to Applications

    Open the downloaded disk image and drag the shield across. Nothing is installed yet — the app is just a file at this point.

  2. 02

    Open it the first time with a right-click

    Right-click the app in Applications and choose Open, then confirm. Double-clicking will be refused, because this build is not signed by Apple — see below. You only have to do this once.

  3. 03

    Approve the install with your Mac password

    Hard Stop asks for your administrator password once, to install the background service that does the blocking. This is your ordinary Mac password, not the guardian password.

  4. 04

    Give the guardian password away

    A password is generated and shown once. Send it to someone you trust and do not keep a copy. This is the whole design: from here on, unlocking is their decision, not yours.

Why macOS will warn you

This build is not signed with an Apple Developer certificate or notarized, so macOS treats it as coming from an unidentified developer and blocks the first launch. That warning is macOS doing its job — it cannot tell the difference between an independent build and something harmful. Verifying the checksum below is the honest way to check you got the file we published. A signed build is coming; it costs a developer account, not a rewrite.

SHA-256

2773789bbb045ffa242f79da05df7aee44002fb529cebe92d451bbfadf4f92d0

If it still says “Apple could not verify”

macOS quarantines every file that came out of a downloaded disk image, and right-click → Open only clears the flag on the app itself — not on the service inside it. Paste this into Terminal, then open Hard Stop again. (If you clicked “Move to Trash”, delete the app and drag it across from the disk image once more first.)

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine "/Applications/Hard Stop.app"

Requirements

  • macOS 14 Sonoma or later
  • An administrator account, for the install only
  • Someone you trust to hold the password — the software does nothing useful without this