Search without a company in the middle
Searxly was a native Mac browser, SwiftUI on WebKit, that shipped a full SearXNG metasearch engine inside the app and ran it on your own Mac. Your queries went from your machine to the search engines and nowhere else: no search company in between, no account, no telemetry. Tor was built in for everything else.
Docker out, Python in
The first version needed Docker. Two days after the source went public, Docker was gone, replaced by a relocatable, code-signed Python 3.12 with SearXNG bundled inside the app, every native library signed under the hardened runtime, and a self-test that served a real search before anything was packaged. The build even deleted pip's launcher scripts, because their paths would have carried the build machine's username into every copy.
Sandboxed, with a helper on a short leash
The app ran in the App Sandbox. Starting Python and Tor needed an unsandboxed helper, so that helper accepted connections only from code signed by the same team, and could touch only two folders, with symbolic links resolved before the check, so neither a ../ nor a planted link could escape.
A quarter of a million rules
Ad and tracker blocking compiled 256,816 rules from 14 lists into WebKit's own content blocker, split into chunks of 40,000 to stay inside WebKit's limits, so blocking happened before most page scripts had a chance to run.
One codebase, two products
Searxly Maximum was the same source built as a second app, for people who assume they are being watched: Tor always on and impossible to switch off, and a kill switch that failed closed, holding back Searxly's own traffic until protection was verified. An iPhone beta followed on TestFlight. It never reached the App Store.
Finished
Eight releases went out in 22 days, from 0.9.5 on 6 July 2026 to 1.4 on 28 July. Then I stopped. The source stays public for anyone who wants to read how it was done. Its licence was PolyForm Noncommercial, which makes it source-available rather than open source, and the public tree leaves out a few parts, so it does not build a working app on its own.