The most useful Mac and iOS app deals for Black Friday 2025

New Apple hardware is only half the story. The right apps are what make a Mac, iPhone, or iPad feel tailored to the way you work, study, or live. Black Friday 2025 is one of the few moments when many of the best indie and pro-grade apps drop their prices, often on one-time licenses that almost never go on sale.

The standout deals this year fall into four buckets: task management, screenshots and capture, everyday utilities, and “set-and-forget” helpers that quietly save you time or money.

Core productivity: Things 3 across Mac, iPhone, and iPad

Things 3 is the archetypal example of a premium app that almost never discounts. The task manager is sold separately on each platform with no subscription: you buy the Mac app once, the iPhone app once, and the iPad app once, and you own them on that platform.

The catch is obvious: if you want a fully synced setup, you’re still paying for three apps. The upside is just as clear. There’s no recurring fee, and this annual Black Friday window is the only predictable time the price drops. If you’ve been holding off because of the total cost across devices, this is when it makes sense to commit.

Screenshots, screen recording, and visual notes: CleanShot X and ScreenFloat

Screenshots are built into macOS, but anyone who documents bugs, teaches, or explains things for a living reaches for specialist tools quickly. Two stand out this year.

CleanShot X is the power user’s choice on Mac. Beyond simple screenshots, it adds:

• Scrolling capture for full pages and long views
• Instant OCR so you can copy text straight out of images
• Quick annotation tools for arrows, highlights, and callouts
• GIF export and screen recording with optional camera overlay
• Cloud sharing links for handing off captures to teammates or clients

The direct discount on a single‑Mac license is already strong. If you also want tools like DaisyDisk and Default Folder X, the Unclutter bundle is a better overall value, bringing CleanShot’s effective price down even further while giving you 11 more utilities on perpetual licenses.

ScreenFloat solves a different problem: keeping reference material visible while you work elsewhere. It turns each capture into a little floating window that sits above other apps, with a built‑in library to manage everything. It’s especially useful for coding, design work, or long-form writing where you’re constantly glancing back at specs, mocks, or previous notes.

Clipboard history and cross‑device copy‑paste: PastePal and Paste

Good clipboard managers feel invisible until the moment they save you. Black Friday 2025 has two notable options aimed at slightly different users.

PastePal is set up as a universal clipboard manager: you buy it once and use it across Mac, iPhone, and iPad. It records everything you copy — text, images, and other media — and lets you browse that history as a timeline or by category. On Mac, a pop‑up sidebar surfaces recent items for quick reuse; on iOS and iPadOS, the synced history means a snippet copied in Safari on your phone can be pasted into a document on your Mac a few seconds later.

Paste leans into a richer, more opinionated design on macOS, with a long, searchable history, pinned snippets, and custom collections. The key difference is the pricing model: Paste uses a subscription that is half off for the first year during Black Friday. That may be preferable if you value continuous updates and don’t mind ongoing billing, but for people trying to reduce subscriptions, PastePal’s one‑time purchase at 50 percent off is hard to ignore.

Menu bar chaos control: Bartender 6

macOS Sequoia and a modern app stack quickly fill the menu bar with icons: VPNs, cloud storage, note‑taking apps, audio tools, and more. Bartender 6 tackles this UI clutter directly.

Bartender lets you:

• Hide rarely used icons behind a secondary bar to reduce visual noise
• Group related icons (for example, audio tools or cloud services)
• Swap layouts depending on whether you are on battery, external display, or a focused work profile
• Trigger icons with keyboard shortcuts instead of clicking tiny targets

The savings here aren’t enormous in raw dollars, but it’s a polished, long‑lived utility. If you routinely lose track of which tiny glyph does what, this small discount is a good excuse to finally impose some order.

Subscription tracking: Subscription Day and SubManager

With streaming, cloud storage, pro apps, and Patreon‑style memberships, subscription creep is a real budget problem. Two indie tools are using Black Friday to get onto more home screens.

Subscription Day lives in the Mac menu bar and presents everything in a calendar layout: which services renew on which day, how much they cost, and which ones you might want to cancel before the next charge hits. The current deal halves the price and includes the future iOS app once it launches, which makes sense if you want the same view on your phone in the coming months.

SubManager focuses on iOS today. Its premium in‑app purchase unlocks features like renewal notifications at a steep Black Friday discount. You can also backfill older spending manually, so long-time users of services like Lightroom can still get a more accurate lifetime total. This is a good pick if you mainly manage your life from your iPhone and don’t need a Mac component.

Drag‑and‑drop and window management: Yoink and BundleHunt’s Mac bundle

Dragging files around macOS is still more awkward than it should be when you’re juggling multiple desktops and full‑screen apps. Yoink’s deal inside BundleHunt’s 2025 Mac bundle is one of the simplest ways to fix that.

Yoink works like a shelf that pops out at the edge of your screen when you start dragging something. You drop files or snippets there, switch spaces or windows at your leisure, and then drag from Yoink into the final destination. It dramatically cuts down mis‑drops and the awkward “where do I hold this file while I navigate?” dance.

On the same bundle, Mosaic Pro and Spotless are discounted by roughly 85–90 percent off their list prices. Mosaic gives you drag‑and‑drop window management and predefined tiling layouts; Spotless lets you define rules so that, for example, anything dumped into Downloads gets automatically filed into folders by type or age on a schedule.

BundleHunt’s approach is à la carte: you pay a low base unlock price, then add individual apps like Yoink, Mosaic, or Downie for a few dollars each. It’s one of the most efficient ways to stock a new Mac with essentials in a single pass, and the per‑app pricing is dramatically lower than buying direct, while still providing full licenses from the original developers.

Battery health and charging: AlDente Pro

Laptops that live on power adapters age badly if they sit at 100 percent charge all day. AlDente Pro gives MacBook owners much finer control over how and when the battery charges.

With AlDente Pro you can:

• Set a maximum charge level (for example, 80 percent) to slow long‑term battery wear
• Switch between different protection modes depending on whether you’re travelling or docked
• Use a calibration mode to keep the system’s estimation of battery health accurate
• Adjust MagSafe LED behavior on supported MacBook models

For anyone running a MacBook as a mostly‑stationary machine, this is a small, one‑time investment that can realistically extend usable battery life by reducing full‑charge time, especially over multi‑year ownership.

Email and link workflows: OpenIn and Mimestream

If your workday is built around links and email, two Mac‑only tools stand out in the current sales window.

OpenIn gives you precise control over how macOS opens links and files. Instead of a single default browser, you can create rules such as:

• Open work Slack links in one browser profile and personal links in another
• Send Figma or Notion URLs to specific browsers that stay logged in to the right accounts
• Route file types to non‑default apps if you prefer third‑party editors

At 70 percent off, it’s a low‑risk way to claw back a lot of wasted time spent copy‑pasting URLs into the “right” browser window.

Mimestream is a Gmail‑only email client built as a native Mac app. It leans into Gmail features like labels, categories, filters, and server‑side rules while providing a traditional desktop interface with fast search and keyboard shortcuts. If every account you care about is on Gmail and webmail tabs are driving you up the wall, the first‑year discount makes it easier to justify trialing it seriously.

Most of these deals run on fixed Black Friday and Cyber Monday timelines, with some bundles and coupon codes expiring within days. The best way to think about them is not as impulse buys, but as a chance to lock in high‑impact, low‑maintenance tools — especially perpetual licenses like Things 3, CleanShot X, Yoink, and AlDente Pro that rarely see meaningful discounts.