Nekoze vs SitSense: A Decade-Old Cat Alert vs Modern Webcam AI

Side by Side

A Decade of Cat Meows

Nekoze is genuinely simple: it watches your face through the webcam, and when you drift from a baseline you set, a cat meows and a notification appears in the corner of your screen. It has been free since it launched in 2013, with no in-app purchases at any point — a real, uncomplicated thing that has quietly kept working for over a decade.

It was also built by one developer, Katsuma Tanaka, as a small utility rather than a product with a roadmap, and that shows in what it does and doesn’t do next.

The Detection Is Simpler, and Older

Nekoze calibrates to a face-position baseline you set, then alerts when your face drifts from it — that’s facial-position tracking, not full-body pose estimation. There’s no itemized breakdown of neck angle, shoulder slope, or trunk position, and no history or trend view; it’s a real-time alert and nothing else.

User reviews on the App Store describe real accuracy limits: trouble recognizing faces with glasses, false alerts with no posture change, and sensitivity to camera angle and lighting — the kind of issues a decade-old facial-recognition approach runs into that a modern pose-estimation model like MediaPipe is built to handle better.

Maintenance Matters for Something Watching You Work

Nekoze’s Mac App Store listing shows its last update as September 6, 2022 — roughly four years before this comparison was written. It may well still run fine on current macOS, but it is not being actively developed the way a newer tool is, and that is worth knowing before you build a daily habit around it.

SitSense, by contrast, changed its core mechanic as recently as August 2026 — the reef and companion replaced an older score-based design. Whatever you think of that change, it is evidence the product is still being actively built.