the rewind mac app is gone: what replaces each feature in 2026

the rewind mac app stopped recording on december 19, 2025, and there is no way to get rewind back on mac. in our view, no single app replaces all of it, so the answer is a map. as of october 2026, use screenmemory or timescroll for the scrubbable timeline, remynd for searching what you saw with a hotkey, a notes app like granola for meeting summaries, and your own agent for anything like ask rewind.

can you get rewind back on mac?

no, and nothing official will bring capture back. on december 5, 2025, limitless, the company rewind had become, announced that meta had acquired it. 9to5mac reported that the latest update would disable "all screen and audio capture starting december 19," which 9to5mac said left the app useless.

limitless's own notice says it is sunsetting everything except the pendant, rewind included. rewind.ai itself now hosts an unrelated ai tools site, so there is no rewind macos app download to go back to, and an installer claiming to be one deserves suspicion. the full timeline is in what happened to rewind ai.

your old library is a separate question. rewind's help center pointed to ~/library/application support/com.memoryvault.memoryvault, with audio in a snippets folder, and said in april 2024 that it did "not yet support a way to export videos". leave that folder alone until you have read how to export rewind ai data.

what did the rewind mac app actually do?

rewind did seven jobs on your mac, and most people leaned on two or three of them. here they are, from rewind's own pages as archived in 2024 and 2025:

• timeline. it captured a frame every two seconds, and command + shift + scroll opened it so you could browse back and forth in time.
• search. ocr ran on the mac, and command + shift + space reopened your last search.
• meetings. it recorded zoom, meet and teams calls without a bot, did speech recognition on the mac, and could send transcripts to openai for summaries.
• ask rewind. a chatgpt powered assistant, opened from the menu bar logo or command + shift + /, that sent relevant text to rewind's model partners.
• privacy controls. you excluded apps under settings, then privacy, and it skipped private windows in chrome, safari, arc, firefox and brave by default.
• storage. rewind claimed up to 3,750x compression, and said users averaged 14 gb a month, all kept on the mac.
• the menu bar. pausing capture and opening ask rewind both sat behind the menu bar icon.

in 2024 the pricing page listed pro at $29 a month, or $19 a month billed yearly, beside a $0 tier that showed only the top three search results. the homepage said recording used 20 to 40% of one core, or 1 to 5% of total cpu, and that rewind ran on apple silicon and on any intel mac. more on the plans in rewind ai pricing.

where does each rewind feature live now?

in our view, no app on macos does every row of this table well, which is the main thing to know before you switch. running two of these side by side is fine.

screenmemory's own faq says an 8 hour day at one capture a minute uses about 280 mb, so it trades rewind's two second detail for a smaller disk footprint. timescroll saves a snapshot every few seconds when something on screen changes.

which rewind features does remynd not replace?

remynd covers rewind's search, its call transcripts and its exclusion list, and it leaves three gaps worth knowing about.

first, there is no ask chat inside the app. search replaced it, and it runs as full text over an index on your mac, built with apple vision ocr. when a search reads like a question, remynd sends only the words you typed, any filters, the date and your time zone to its ai to plan the search, through openrouter and only to zero data retention providers. your history, your results and your screen are never in that request.

second, for meetings the general release stops at the transcript. if a written summary in your inbox was the point of rewind for you, pair remynd with a notes app, or use the notes app alone.

third, hardware. rewind ran on intel macs, and remynd does not. if your mac predates apple silicon, timescroll or screenmemory is the realistic choice today.

how do you switch from rewind in 10 minutes?

switching takes about ten minutes if you skip the archaeology and keep the old library where it is. this is the order we would use:

1. leave the old library alone. check ~/library/application support/com.memoryvault.memoryvault before you clean up your disk, then follow the rewind export guide.
2. download remynd. it is free to download, for apple silicon macs on macos 14 or later.
3. grant screen recording. apple's support page walks through system settings, then privacy & security, then screen & system audio recording. more on why macos asks in screen recording permission on mac.
4. set your exclusions. pick the apps and sites remynd should never record. password managers are already on the block list.
5. press control + space. type a word you remember seeing, or ask a question in plain english, the way you used command + shift + space in rewind.
6. optional: connect your own agent. open agent in the menu bar runs your own claude code or codex against your history through a local read only tool. whatever it reads, including screen frames (on by default, and you can switch them off), goes to anthropic or openai under your account.

which replacement should you pick?

pick by the rewind feature you used most, not by the longest feature list. the best rewind ai mac app replacement is the one that does your favorite job well. this is our judgement:

• use screenmemory if you mostly scrolled the timeline and want a one time price: $29 with a year of updates and $5 a year after that, or $39 for lifetime updates.
• use timescroll if you want free, readable source code, or you are still on an intel mac.
• use remynd if you mostly searched for things you had seen, want call transcripts made on your mac, and want questions answered by your own agent.
• use granola if what you actually miss is meeting notes rather than screen history.
• use screenpipe if you want source you can read across macos, windows and linux. it is source available under its own commercial license, with a free plan and basic at $25 a month, or $250 a year (pricing). see remynd vs screenpipe.

for the wider field, including microsoft recall and limitless, read best rewind ai alternatives in 2026 or the side by side on rewind ai alternatives.

why should the archive live on your own mac?

rewind's shutdown showed that an archive is only as durable as the company holding it. remynd keeps your recordings on your mac, reads screen text there with apple vision, and keeps the searchable index there too. cloud sync is optional, and recordings are encrypted on your mac before upload, to remynd's storage on a paid plan or to your own s3 bucket. the details are on the security page.

download remynd for mac free to download, for apple silicon macs on macos 14 or later.