BloomUpdated 23 October 2026 · 5 min read
On iPhone and iPad, AssistiveTouch puts a small floating button on the screen. Tap it and a menu opens with Home, Control Center, screenshots, volume and any gesture you saved. Apple added it in iOS 5 for people who find buttons and gestures hard to use, and plenty of people now use it simply because it's quicker.
macOS has no equivalent. There's no floating button, and nothing called AssistiveTouch in System Settings. A few built-in features cover parts of the idea, though.
What macOS has instead
Accessibility Keyboard panels
The closest built-in option. Turn on the Accessibility Keyboard in System Settings → Accessibility → Keyboard, then open the Panel Editor to build your own floating panel of buttons. Buttons can press keys, open apps, run AppleScript or a Shortcut, and change volume or brightness.
It works, but it's a panel rather than a button: it takes up space all the time, the editor is hard to find, and building a good layout takes a while.
Hot Corners
In System Settings → Desktop & Dock → Hot Corners you can assign an action to each corner of the screen, like Mission Control, the desktop or Lock Screen. You get four actions and no menu.
Control Center and the menu bar
Control Center can be customized and holds toggles like Focus, screen mirroring and Stage Manager. It's great for settings, but it doesn't run keyboard shortcuts or app actions.
Keyboard shortcuts
Almost everything AssistiveTouch does has a Mac shortcut. The catch is remembering them. Our free Mac Shortcut Finder lists them all.
Getting a real floating button
That gap is why we built Bloom. It puts a small glass button on the edge of your screen, and a tap opens a full grid of nine actions:
- 98 built-in Mac actions, like Mission Control, screenshots, automatic window tiling, media keys, Sleep, Wi-Fi and Dark Mode.
- Your own actions: any keyboard shortcut, an app, a link, or a Shortcut.
- A different menu for each app, so Safari gets tab actions and Figma gets undo and zoom.
- Separate jobs for click, double-click, long-press, right-click and scroll.
Like the iPhone version, it fades when you're not using it, snaps to the edges, and stays out of the way of whatever you're doing. It's a one-time purchase with a 14-day money-back guarantee.