Android notifications on a Mac: what the old guides get wrong
Search for how to get your Android phone’s notifications on a Mac and the results have a strange quality: they are confident, well written, and mostly from 2016.
The pages that rank point at a project called Noti — a small menu-bar app that relayed notifications from your phone to your Mac. It was genuinely good. It also has not been worked on for years, and if you follow one of those old links you can end up somewhere worse than a dead end.
What actually happened to Noti
Noti’s repository is archived. Its
last release was version 0.3.2, in July
2018. Four years later two final commits landed — one titled bye, and an edit to
the README asking for someone to take the project over. That is a normal thing to
happen to a side project with 910 stars and one maintainer, and it is not a
criticism of anyone.
The README carries a second notice that matters more, because it affects anyone following a ten-year-old link today:
the noti.center domain has been hijacked and filled with spam and shouldn’t be considered legitimate anymore. This repo is the only official place to get noti on the web.
So the top guides for this question send readers to a project that is no longer being developed, and the domain those guides link to is no longer the author’s.
There is a second reason the old answer stopped working, and it is the more interesting one. Noti did not talk to your phone directly. Its README describes it as relaying the notifications you get on your Android phone “with Pushbullet installed on it”. The 2016 answer to “notifications on my Mac” was built on the exact service a lot of people are now trying to replace.
What works in 2026
Here is the honest landscape, including the parts that are not us.
KDE Connect is the one genuinely cross-platform free option here. It runs on macOS, Windows and Linux, it costs nothing, and it is actively developed by its community — the current release shipped in July 2026. Its privacy policy is unusually direct about the model: traffic is “always encrypted using TLS1.2” and goes between the two devices over the local network rather than through a server. Two things are worth knowing before you pick it: its browser integration is built for the Plasma desktop, and that same device-to-device model means it is happiest when your phone and your computer are on the same network. If that describes how you work, it is a good answer and you should use it.
Microsoft Phone Link is the clean “no” for this question. It is a Windows feature — Microsoft’s own requirements list a PC running Windows 10 or 11. There is no macOS version and no browser extension, so on a Mac it is simply not an option, however often it appears in a listicle.
Pushbullet is still running, and it is still where a lot of the old guides send you. There is no macOS app, so on a Mac the browser is the whole product — which means the browser you use now decides whether it works at all.
Its Chrome extension is Manifest V2, and Chrome disabled every Manifest V2 extension for all users in July 2025 — there is no setting to turn one back on, and Google’s timeline has the last Manifest V2 listings leaving the Web Store on 31 August 2026. If you were using Pushbullet in Chrome, that is why it stopped.
Its Firefox add-on is a different story, and worth knowing if you gave up on it: still listed, still installable, still doing notification mirroring. Mozilla has said it has no plans to deprecate Manifest V2 and would give at least twelve months’ notice if that ever changed. So on a Mac, Firefox is where Pushbullet still works today. The add-on was last updated in March 2023 — which is the kind of fact worth checking yourself before you commit to anything in this category, including the rest of this list.
Its encryption is also worth knowing about if you are comparing on privacy: it is optional, off by default, and works from one shared password you type into every device.
Reflecto is ours, so treat this paragraph accordingly. It mirrors Android notifications into Chrome or Safari on a Mac, you can reply and dismiss from the keyboard, and encryption is on by default with per-device keys rather than a shared password. There is no Mac app to install and no account to create. It works over the internet, so your phone can be on cellular while your Mac is on a cafe network. The honest limitations are on the page: it needs an Android phone, the side panel is Chrome-only, and there is no screen mirroring.
If you want the detail, we wrote it up properly: Android notifications on your Mac.
Why this keeps happening
Search rewards pages that have been linked to for a decade. It does not notice when the software those pages recommend stops being developed, and nobody goes back to update a guide from 2016.
That is worth remembering beyond this one question. If you are picking a tool that sits between your phone and your computer — something that sees every notification you get — the useful checks are cheap ones. When did it last ship? Who maintains it? Is the encryption on by default or is it a setting you have to find? Is the link you are following still owned by the person who wrote the software?
Those questions would have saved a lot of people a download in 2026. They are also, fairly, the questions you should ask about us.
Every claim about another product here is linked to that company’s or project’s own documentation, checked 13 August 2026. Corrected on that date: an earlier version of this post described Pushbullet’s Chrome situation and then concluded that it had stopped working, without mentioning that its Firefox add-on is still listed and still supported. That was wrong on a Mac, where Firefox is a perfectly ordinary choice, and it is exactly the failure this post is about — so it is recorded here rather than quietly edited.