Mac notch apps: what they do and which one to pick

Updated 20 September 2026.

The MacBook notch is the only part of your screen that is always visible and always doing nothing. The apps on this page give it a job: music controls, somewhere to park a file, clipboard history, your next calendar event.

There are four worth knowing about and there is no single right answer — it depends on what you need and what you are willing to spend. Below: what each one does, what it costs, and which one to pick, including the cases where the answer is not ours.

What a notch app actually does

They all start from the same idea: move the pointer to the notch and a panel drops down. What is inside it varies, but five functions come up again and again.

• Music controls. Title, artwork and transport buttons without opening Spotify or Music. Every one of them has this.
• A place to park files. Drag something into the notch and it waits there instead of cluttering the desktop.
• Clipboard history. The thing you copied before the last thing, which macOS does not keep on its own.
• Calendar and reminders, so the next event is visible without switching windows.
• HUD replacement — volume and brightness drawn in the notch instead of in the middle of your screen.

The four options, compared

Checked on 20 September 2026 against each project’s own site or repository. Prices and features change — verify before you decide.

Notchy — free, and it does a great deal

If you want the most functionality without paying, this is the answer and it is not close: roughly seventy features, from clipboard history to a Pomodoro timer, system HUDs, OCR and face-recognition unlock. It is notarized by Apple, so it installs without a warning, it runs on macOS 13 — one version further back than the others — and it ships in 134 languages.

It is not open source, and it is maintained by one developer who accepts donations. If your criterion is “as much as possible for nothing”, start here.

Boring Notch — free and open source

Music controls with a visualizer, calendar, a file shelf with AirDrop, and HUD replacement. Ten thousand stars on GitHub and a GPL licence: you can read every line before you run it, and if the developer disappears the code does not.

The one real friction is installing it. With no Apple developer account, the builds are neither signed nor notarized: on first launch macOS refuses to open it, and the documented fix is a Terminal command.

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/boringNotch.app

That strips the quarantine flag — it tells macOS to stop checking. It works, plenty of people do it, and for open-source code you can read it is a reasonable trade. Just be clear about what it is: switching off the check that exists to stop you running something you did not mean to run.

NotchNook — the best known paid one

Media controls with artwork, calendar, a file tray and a webcam preview. $25 once for five Macs, or $3 a month for two, and it is included in Setapp — if you already pay for Setapp it costs you nothing extra. Twenty-nine languages. It needs macOS 14.6, slightly newer than the rest.

Dynamic Notch — ours

The conflict of interest first: this page is on our site. So here is where we are not the answer. If you want to spend nothing, Notchy does more. If you have more than two Macs, NotchNook covers five. If your Mac does not run in English, Italian or Spanish, they speak your language and we do not.

Four things we do that the others do not list:

• Voice memos that come back as text. Record a thought and get a transcription. The audio is normalised first, so a memo taken at arm’s length from the built-in mic is still readable.
• A browser video, moved into the notch. A YouTube video playing in Safari, Chrome, Brave, Edge, Vivaldi or Arc lifts into a small player under the notch, resuming at the exact second the tab had reached, and hands back when you are done. No screen recording permission involved.
• Clipboard history that refuses passwords. It skips what macOS marks as concealed and, because macOS does not always mark them, also refuses anything copied while a password manager is the frontmost app. That second rule exists because measurement showed the first was not enough: seven leaks in four hundred marked copies.
• A webcam mirror for the look before a call. The camera starts when you open the module and stops the moment you leave it.

€14.99 once, no subscription, with seven days free that ask for no account, no email and no card.

How to choose, in four lines

• You want to spend nothing and want a lot of features: Notchy.
• You want to spend nothing and would rather run code you can read, or you want the system HUDs replaced: Boring Notch.
• You have more than two Macs, or your Mac is not in English, Italian or Spanish, or you already pay for Setapp: NotchNook.
• You want transcribed voice memos, the browser video in the notch, or a clipboard that is careful about passwords: Dynamic Notch.

Two things worth knowing before you install any of them

None of them draws inside the cutout. On a MacBook with a notch that area is an absence of screen, not black screen. What these apps do is open a borderless window tucked under the cutout, drawn to match its exact measurements: at rest it blends into the notch, and when you open it a panel drops down. The effect is convincing; the mechanism is different from what it looks like.

They work without a notch too. On an iMac, a Mac mini or an external display they draw a shape of the same proportions against the top edge and behave the same way. The notch is where they hide, not what they need.

What they cost in battery

This is the right question to ask, and the one most pages skip. An app that is always running and animating something over a large translucent panel can cost real battery: the expensive part is not the size of the thing that moves, it is that the whole blurred region has to be redrawn.

Ask for a measured number rather than a reassurance. Ours: with music playing and the media card on screen, Dynamic Notch measured 0.33% CPU on an M-series MacBook Pro, down from 6.4% before the animations were moved to Core Animation. With nothing playing it sits near zero.

Try Dynamic Notch, 7 days free See what it does