Legal

License and attribution.

Aerial license

Aerial is open-source software, released under the MIT license . © Guillaume Louel and contributors. The full license text is in the source repository.

Apple's videos

The aerial videos from macOS and tvOS are produced by Apple. Aerial downloads them from Apple's content delivery network onto your Mac, the same way macOS itself does. It does not host, mirror or redistribute them.

Expansions

Every expansion pack declares its own license in its manifest, and nothing is installed unless you choose to. The free Community packs by Joshua Michaels & Hal Bergman are shared under the terms at jetsoncreative.com/aeriallicense . Their paid packs come with their own terms, available where you buy them.

Privacy

Aerial has no telemetry, no analytics and no crash reporting of any kind. There is no Aerial server, and nothing identifies you in the requests it makes. Out of the box it talks to Apple's content delivery network to download videos, and to this site (GitHub Pages) for update checks, the expansions catalog and video thumbnails.

Some optional features reach other services when you turn them on: the weather overlay queries OpenWeather, YouTube live feeds go through yt-dlp to YouTube, camera feeds connect to whatever address you gave them, and automatic location uses Apple's Location Services. Each of those has its own privacy policy, which I'd encourage you to read.

Trademarks

Apple, macOS, tvOS, Apple TV and Mac are trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. Aerial is a third-party project with no affiliation to Apple.

Thanks

Aerial is built on the work of others: Sparkle for updates, created by Andy Matuschak and kept alive since by Kornel Lesiński and, today, Mayur Pawashe (Zorg); KeyboardShortcuts by Sindre Sorhus for the global hotkeys, mediaremote-adapter by Jonas van den Berg (BSD 3-Clause) for the music overlay, and PaperSaver for talking to the macOS wallpaper system. Live feeds optionally rely on ffmpeg and yt-dlp, which you install yourself.

John Coates started the project in 2015. The original repository keeps the early history.