See your Android phone's notifications on your Mac while the phone sits charging with its screen off, so you can tell at a glance whether something needs you without picking the phone up.
When your phone's screen is off and it's plugged into a charger, Notification Bridge forwards each new notification to your Mac, where it appears as a normal macOS notification. Dismiss it on the phone and it disappears from the Mac too. As soon as you turn the screen on (or unplug it), forwarding stops, so you don't get everything twice.
It's most useful when your phone is in silent mode: the Mac shows you what arrived, so you can ignore what can wait and pick up the phone for what can't.
Everything stays on your local network. There's no account, no cloud service, and the phone talks directly to the Mac over an encrypted connection.
- A Mac running macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later.
- An Android phone running Android 14 or later.
- Both on the same Wi-Fi network.
Download the latest notification-bridge-<version>.zip from the
Releases page
and unzip it. Inside are both apps.
Move Notification Bridge.app to your Applications folder and open it. macOS
will check that you want to open an app downloaded from the internet; click
Open.
Copy Notification Bridge.apk to your phone (for example over USB, or by
emailing it to yourself) and open it. Android will ask whether to allow the app
you opened it from to install apps; allow it, then tap Install.
To update either app later, download the new release and install it over the top. Your pairing and settings are kept.
Notification Bridge lives in the menu bar; there's no Dock icon or window.
The first time it runs, macOS will ask for two permissions. Allow both:
- Notifications, so it can show your phone's notifications.
- Local network, so your phone can find it and connect.
To have it start automatically, turn on Launch at Login in its menu.
Open Notification Bridge on the phone. The Setup section lists the permissions it needs; tap each button and allow it:
- Grant notification access lets the app read your notifications so it can forward them.
- Grant local network access lets it find and connect to your Mac (only asked for on newer versions of Android).
- Allow background running stops Android from putting the app to sleep while the screen is off, which is exactly when it needs to work.
Each line changes from "missing" to "granted" once it's done.
Make sure the Mac app is running, then on the phone tap Add Mac.
- The phone searches the network for ten seconds and lists each Mac running Notification Bridge, with its fingerprint, as it's found.
- Check that the fingerprint matches This Mac: in the Mac app's menu, then tap the Mac. The phone remembers that Mac and sends it a test notification. If your Mac isn't listed, check it's running and tap Search again.
- Your Mac shows an Allow (phone name)? notification, with a fingerprint
such as
3F2A-91C0-7B4E. Check that it matches the This phone: line in the phone app. - Click Allow on the Mac notification (or choose Pair (phone name) > Allow from the menu bar).
The test notification then appears on your Mac, and that Mac's Last: line on the phone reads "Delivered to (your Mac)". You're done.
The fingerprints are there so you can be sure the phone and the Mac are talking to each other and not to some other device on the network. The phone only sends to Macs you've paired, and the Mac ignores any phone you haven't allowed.
The phone can be paired with up to three Macs (for example one at work and one at home), and every notification is sent to all of them. A Mac that's switched off or on another network doesn't hold up delivery to the others. To stop sending to a Mac for a while without unpairing it, switch it off in the Macs section.
Just plug your phone in and let the screen turn off. New notifications will show up on your Mac.
Click a notification on the Mac to open it in a window showing its full text, which you can select and copy.
Some notifications are never forwarded, because they would only be noise:
- ongoing notifications, such as music playback, navigation or downloads in progress;
- minimised notifications that only appear when you expand the notification shade;
- notifications with no title or text.
Silent notifications are held back for five seconds before being forwarded, and dropped if in that time they've gone away or turned into an ongoing notification. This keeps out brief status messages such as "Backing up...". Notifications that would normally make a sound arrive straight away.
The Apps section of the phone app lists every app that has posted a notification since Notification Bridge was installed. Switch off any app you don't want to see on your Mac. Apps appear in the list the first time they post a notification, so the list grows over time.
- On the phone: tap Forget under the Mac in the Macs section. Nothing more is sent to that Mac until you pair it again with Add Mac.
- On the Mac: choose Paired Phones > Forget "(phone name)". The next notification from that phone will ask for permission again.
If you click Deny when a phone asks to pair, that phone is blocked for good and won't ask again. To clear the list of blocked phones, quit the Mac app, run this in Terminal, and reopen it:
defaults delete au.glob.NotificationBridge deniedPhonesEach Mac's Last: line in the phone app shows what happened to the most recent notification sent to it.
"Failed: mac not found": the phone couldn't find your Mac. After this the phone waits a minute before looking for it again. Check that the Mac app is running and says Listening in its menu, that both devices are on the same Wi-Fi network, and that the Mac app has local network access (System Settings > Privacy & Security > Local Network). Some networks, such as guest or office Wi-Fi, block devices from seeing each other.
"Waiting for approval on (your Mac)": the Mac hasn't allowed this phone yet. Look for the Allow notification, or use Pair in the menu bar.
"Denied by (your Mac)": this phone was denied. See Unpairing to clear it.
"Rejected by (your Mac)": the Mac couldn't accept the message. The most likely cause is that the phone's and Mac's clocks differ by more than five minutes; make sure both set their time automatically.
The test works, but real notifications don't arrive: the test is sent straight away, but real notifications are only forwarded while the screen is off and the phone is plugged in. Also check that the app isn't switched off in the Apps list and that Allow background running is granted. Some phones have extra battery-saving settings of their own that can stop background apps; if yours does, exclude Notification Bridge from them.
Nothing appears on the Mac, but the phone says "Delivered": check that notifications for Notification Bridge are allowed in System Settings > Notifications, and that a Focus mode isn't hiding them.
If something isn't working and the troubleshooting tips above don't help, please start a discussion on GitHub. Describe what you expected to happen, what happened instead, and the versions of macOS, Android and Notification Bridge you're running.
Issues are reserved for confirmed, actionable work. Once we've talked it through and confirmed it's a bug, I'll open an issue to track the fix.
The code is released under the MIT License.
The app icons are modified from the
Material Symbols by Google
and are released under the Apache License 2.0. This covers
icons/ and the copies built into both apps (under mac/Resources/ and
android/app/src/main/res/).