Mate Engine for macOS v1.1.0 — First Release From the Fork
Mate Engine for macOS v1.1.0 — First Release From the Fork
2026-09-05 · Release announcement
Our desktop companion is officially out in the wild. Today we cut v1.1.0, the first release from the freckslaydown-byte fork — a tagged, universal, Apple Silicon build you can download, drag into /Applications/, and meet.
For anyone new: this is a native macOS port of Mate Engine, the open-source desktop-pet app. It lives on your desktop, follows your work with an ambient-awareness that hugs your screen edges, dances when music plays, chats with you, and — as of this release — talks back through a proper voice channel.
What ships in v1.1.0
- Daemon command channel — an external daemon can make your pet speak. Commands land via a local poll and come out through GPT-SoVITS TTS, fully in-character.
- GPT-SoVITS TTS support — new API-schema support, plus runtime-safe handler creation so the voice works even mid-scene.
- Settings toggles — handshake and command polling are now switchable right from the UI.
- Licensing housekeeping — NOTICE.txt expanded with every bundled third-party license (VRM10, Tomlyn, Qwen 2.5), folder typos fixed.
update_macos.sh— a pull → build → kill → install dev loop for people running from source.
What it runs on
- macOS 26 (Tahoe) and up
Intel Macs and older macOS are not supported, and won't be — the platform is moving Apple Silicon-only, and we'd rather be honest about the floor than carry an architecture we can't test.
Grab it
Download MateEngineX-v1.1.0-macOS.zip (or the .dmg) from the Releases page, unzip, drag MateEngineX.app into /Applications/.
First launch: right-click → Open (it's ad-hoc signed, not notarized), grant Screen Recording for the ambient-light and dancing features, then right-click the pet or press M for settings.
What's next
The roadmap stays honest — this is milestone M7 of a longer arc:
- M8 — dance-along: the pet hears a song it "knows" and dances the matching choreography
- Upstream sync cadence, localization audits, and a macOS-currency pass as new releases land
Thanks
To CJackHwang for the macOS base this fork builds on, and shinyflvre for the original Mate Engine.
Bug or itch? File it on the fork's Issues — every report helps shape the next one.
*Mate Engine for macOS is distributed under the MateEngine Pro License v2.1 (see LICENSE.md). Third-party components are indexed in NOTICE.txt.*