Lifecycle marketing, in your menu bar

What it looks like

Orion

Lifecycle Assistant · on-device

Should I send to my Apple Mail Privacy Protection users differently?

Yes — and the change isn't sender behaviour, it's metric hygiene. MPP pre-fetches every image regardless of whether the user opens. Open rate is no longer an open rate for that segment. Anyone you flag as engaged based on opens alone is now polluting your suppression model.

The fix is operational, not creative. Stop using opens as a re-engagement signal for MPP-flagged users — switch to clicks, conversions, and recency. Keep sending the same content; just don't reward false engagement.

Sources

• Apple Mail Privacy Protection, four years in
• Segmentation strategy: beyond RFM

Ask anything…

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Approximate render of the menu-bar popover. Real answers cite the relevant Orbit guides and run in the Orbit voice.

What is it

Orion is a small AppKit/SwiftUI app that sits in your macOS menu bar. It stays out of the way until you need it. Click the icon and a chat popover drops down — ask anything inside Orbit's lane and you get a grounded answer with citations to the relevant Orbit guides.

All of Orbit's lifecycle content lives on-device — the voice, the frameworks, the guide library, the lot. That's the point: you don't need Claude, and you don't need to install a custom MCP (the server Claude Desktop loads to gain Orbit's skills). If you want a quick lifecycle answer without any of that setup, this is the door.

Backed by your own model provider — Claude Code CLI, Codex CLI, or your OpenAI API key. The app holds the prompt; you bring the compute. No subscription, no telemetry, no auth.

What it does the rest of the time

Mostly nothing, which is the whole idea. It's an icon in your menu bar between Wi-Fi and the clock. It doesn't bounce, it doesn't badge, it doesn't ask to send you notifications fourteen seconds after launch. No background polling, no telemetry, no calls home — when you're not asking it something, it isn't doing anything. A menu-bar app you forget is running until the moment you need it.

Then you click it, ask the lifecycle question, get the answer, and close it again. That's the entire relationship.

Install

1. Download. Grab the latest .dmg — one click, straight from GitHub Releases.
2. Drag to Applications. Open the .dmg and drag Orion.app into /Applications. Eject the .dmg afterwards.
3. Strip the Gatekeeper quarantine.macOS attaches a quarantine flag to anything downloaded from the internet. Orion isn't in the Apple Developer Programme — it's unsigned, which keeps it free — so Gatekeeper blocks the first launch. Open Terminal (Spotlight → "Terminal"), paste this line, and hit Return:

   xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Orion.app

   Copy
   One command, one time per install. The terminal returns no output on success — that's the command working.
4. Launch Orion.Open it from Applications. The Orbit icon appears in your menu bar, top-right — no Dock icon, because it's a menu-bar app.

Future updates auto-install via Sparkle. The Gatekeeper one-liner shows up again after each update with a one-click "Copy & open Terminal" helper — same command every time. This stops once we ship signed builds.

What it's good for

• Lifecycle program design — onboarding, win-back, transactional, activation flows.
• Deliverability — SPF, DKIM, DMARC, BIMI, Apple MPP, Gmail clipping, IP warm-up, list hygiene.
• Braze specifically — Liquid templating, naming conventions, Canvas patterns.
• A/B testing discipline — sample size, novelty effects, false positives, holdouts.
• Attribution and retention economics for lifecycle programs.

Outside its lane (paid acquisition, finance, legal, generic engineering): it'll say so plainly and offer the closest adjacent take it does have.

FAQ