The Best MacBook Notch Apps in 2026

Apple put a camera housing in the middle of the menu bar and gave you nothing to do with it. The iPhone got the Dynamic Island. The Mac got a black rectangle.

A small group of open-source developers fixed that. Every app below is free, and all of them are on GitHub.

We have a stake here: our own app draws into that area, and it appears at the bottom with the rest of the time trackers rather than the top.

Boring Notch

Free · GPL-3.0 · github.com/TheBoredTeam/boring.notch · ~10.3k stars

The most popular by a wide margin, and the one most people mean when they say "notch app".

It turns the notch into a control centre. Music playback with a visualiser, calendar, a file shelf with AirDrop support, and a replacement for the macOS volume and brightness HUDs so those stop appearing as a grey box in the middle of your screen. Layouts and gestures are customisable.

Requires macOS 14 Sonoma or later, works on Apple Silicon and Intel.

Install this one first if you want the full Dynamic Island experience. It is the most complete, the most actively developed, and has by far the largest community.

MewNotch

Free · GPLv3 · github.com/monuk7735/mew-notch · ~534 stars

Quieter and more system-focused. Where Boring Notch is a control centre, MewNotch is mainly a better HUD.

Brightness and volume feedback with configurable step sizes, suppression of the default macOS HUDs, a persistent file shelf that survives restarts, media controls, multi-display support and a reorderable layout. It will also run bash scripts and show output in the notch, which is a genuinely nice touch for anyone who lives in a terminal.

Pick this if the built-in HUDs are your actual complaint and you do not want a whole control centre.

DynamicNotch

Free · GPL-3.0 · github.com/jackson-storm/DynamicNotch · ~490 stars

The closest to iOS in feel. Live activities for now-playing with an audio visualiser, downloads, AirDrop, timers and screen recording, with physics-based animations that mimic the Dynamic Island properly.

It also has a floating capsule mode for Macs without a notch, so an external monitor or an older MacBook still gets the behaviour.

Requires macOS 14.6 or later.

Pick this if the animation quality is what you care about.

DynamicNotchKit

Free · MIT · github.com/MrKai77/DynamicNotchKit · ~446 stars

Not an app. A Swift package for developers who want their own app to present in the notch.

Written in SwiftUI, so you hand it existing views. It provides DynamicNotch for custom content and DynamicNotchInfo for standard information displays, and it handles the parts that are genuinely fiddly: window management, safe areas, and falling back to a floating style on Macs without a notch.

macOS 13+, installable via Swift Package Manager. MIT licensed, so it is usable in commercial software.

This is the one to reach for if you are building something rather than installing something.

Which to install

| | Best for | Stars | |---|---|---| | Boring Notch | The full control centre. Start here. | ~10.3k | | MewNotch | Replacing the system HUDs, lighter touch | ~534 | | DynamicNotch | Live activities and iOS-quality animation | ~490 | | DynamicNotchKit | Developers building their own | ~446 |

They overlap heavily and all of them replace the macOS HUD. Run one. Two apps competing to draw in the same physical space is exactly as annoying as it sounds.

Why the notch is good real estate

Worth saying, because most coverage treats it as a defect to hide.

It is the only part of the screen that is always visible and never covered. Full-screen apps do not cover it. Windows do not overlap it. Your eyes pass over it every time you check the time.

That makes it the correct place for anything you want to be aware of continuously without going to look for it. Which is a small category, but a valuable one: what is playing, what is transferring, how long something has been running.

Anything you must respond to belongs in a notification. Anything you merely want to know belongs here.

What we do with it

Since it is relevant and we would rather be direct than coy about it: Cronus draws two live counters into that strip, either side of the housing, showing productive and unproductive time as it accumulates.

The reasoning is the same as above. A time tracker you have to open is a time tracker you stop opening. A number already in your eyeline requires no decision to look at it, which is exactly the property that makes an analogue clock on the wall useful.

Positioned from the geometry AppKit reports rather than guessed from screen size, one overlay per display so external monitors work, and mouse-transparent so the menu bar underneath still functions. On a Mac with no notch it draws a narrower gap rather than inventing a hardware obstacle that is not there.

It is $6 a month after a three-day trial and it never captures your screen. And if what you want is music controls rather than time tracking, install Boring Notch — it is free and it is better at that than we will ever be.

A note on running several

All of these suppress the native macOS HUD. If two are running, you get two replacements fighting over the same event, which looks broken and is difficult to diagnose.

If you are trying them out, quit one before launching the next.