Installation
Grab the latest release from the GitHub Releases page. Pick the installer for your platform and you’re good to go.
Windows
Section titled “Windows”Download the .exe installer (NSIS). Run it, click through the prompts, done. It supports both per-user and system-wide installation. If you install per-user, you don’t need admin rights.
The installer registers Reach in your Start Menu and optionally creates a desktop shortcut.
Download the .dmg file. Open it and drag Reach to your Applications folder. Both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs are supported.
Important: macOS will block the app because it’s not signed with an Apple Developer certificate. You’ll see a message saying the app is “damaged” or can’t be opened. To fix this, open Terminal and run:
sudo xattr -cr /Applications/Reach.appThis strips the quarantine flag that macOS adds to downloaded apps. You only need to do this once after installing (or after updating).
Hosts on your local network
Section titled “Hosts on your local network”On macOS 15 and later, connecting to a host on your own network — a NAS, a homelab box, anything on a private address like 10.x, 192.168.x or 172.16–31.x — can fail with No route to host (os error 65) even though ping to the same address works from Terminal. The route is fine. macOS puts every app’s access to the local network behind a permission, enforces it with a packet filter, and reports the dropped packets to the app as if the host were unreachable.
Reach tells you this is what happened when it sees that error against a local address. The switch is System Settings → Privacy & Security → Local Network: turn on Reach.
The honest catch: macOS only offers that prompt, and only lists the app there, for builds signed with an Apple-issued developer certificate — and the current macOS build is not signed. Until it is, the workarounds are to connect through a jump host on a public address, to use a hostname that resolves through a router rather than a link-local path, or to run Reach from a location macOS has already granted (some people report success launching it from Terminal with open -a Reach, since Terminal carries its own grant). The release pipeline signs and notarizes the build automatically once a certificate is configured, and that is the real fix.
There are a few options depending on your distro:
.debfor Debian, Ubuntu, and derivatives. Install withsudo dpkg -i reach_*.debor just double-click it in your file manager..rpmfor Fedora, RHEL, openSUSE. Install withsudo rpm -i reach_*.rpm..AppImageworks on pretty much any distro. Make it executable (chmod +x Reach_*.AppImage) and run it.
Dependencies
Section titled “Dependencies”The .deb and .rpm packages handle dependencies automatically, but if you’re using the AppImage or building from source, make sure you have:
libwebkit2gtk-4.1-0(orwebkit2gtk4.1on Fedora)libappindicator3-1(for the system tray icon)
On Ubuntu/Debian:
sudo apt install libwebkit2gtk-4.1-0 libappindicator3-1On Fedora:
sudo dnf install webkit2gtk4.1 libappindicator-gtk3Android
Section titled “Android”Download the .apk file from the releases page and sideload it. Reach isn’t on the Play Store yet.
You’ll need to enable “Install from unknown sources” in your device settings if you haven’t already.
Auto-updates
Section titled “Auto-updates”Once Reach is installed, it checks for updates on startup and then every 45 minutes while the app is running. When a new version is available, you’ll see a notification with the version number and changelog. You can download and install the update right from that notification, or dismiss it and update later.
Updates are downloaded in the background and applied on restart.
Next steps
Section titled “Next steps”After installation, the first time you open Reach you’ll see a quick setup wizard. Head over to First Run & Setup to see what that looks like.