Boring Notch on Mac: Setup, Safety and Removal

#What is the Boring Notch app?

Boring Notch, styled “The Boring Notch,” is a free, open-source Mac app that makes the area around the MacBook notch interactive, showing now-playing music, a small file shelf and a handful of live activities in a Dynamic Island-style shape. It is built by a group that publishes under TheBoredTeam, and the source code is public on GitHub. The name is a joke: the notch is boring hardware doing nothing, so the app gives it a job. Most people who type boring notch mac into a search box are looking for exactly this app, plus how to get it running and whether to trust it.

It is worth being clear on what the notch is before any of this makes sense. Apple never shipped a Dynamic Island for the Mac. The cutout on a MacBook Pro or MacBook Air is passive: it houses the camera, and the menu bar wraps around it. Every “island” you see on a Mac, Boring Notch included, is a third-party app painting into that strip. If you want the fuller picture of what actually lives in that band of screen, my write-up on the Mac menu bar and the notch that sits in it covers the hardware side.

Boring Notch matters because it is the project that proved regular people wanted this. It is free, the barrier to trying it is a download, and the community around it is active. That is also why it shows up first for almost every notch-related search. The catch is the one every open-source Mac app runs into: distribution. That is the next section.

#How to allow Boring Notch on your Mac

Here is the wall most people hit. You download Boring Notch, double-click it, and macOS refuses with a message saying the app cannot be opened because it is from an unidentified developer, or that it cannot be checked for malicious software. That is Gatekeeper, and it fires because the public builds are usually not notarized by Apple. It is not a sign the app is broken. It is macOS being cautious about any binary Apple did not scan.

The steps, in order:

1. Download only from the official source. Get the release from the project’s own GitHub releases page, not a mirror, a torrent or a random “download” site. This one habit removes most of the real risk.
2. Move it to Applications and try to open it once. It will be blocked. That is expected: the attempt is what registers the app with Gatekeeper.
3. Open System Settings. Go to Privacy & Security and scroll down. You will see a line noting that “Boring Notch” was blocked. Click Open Anyway.
4. Confirm. Authenticate with your password or Touch ID, then choose Open in the final dialog. From now on it launches normally.

On older versions of macOS you could also right-click (or Control-click) the app icon and choose Open to get the same override in one step. Recent macOS releases have quietly tightened this, so the Privacy & Security route above is the reliable one. If the Open Anyway button never appears, make sure you actually tried to launch the app first, because the button only shows up after macOS has something to override.

One more thing to expect: the app will ask for macOS permissions as you turn features on. Media controls need access to what is playing, and some activities want Accessibility or notifications. Grant them one at a time, when a feature you actually use needs them, rather than approving everything up front.

#What it does, and where it stops

Boring Notch is centered on music, and that is where it feels best. Move your pointer to the notch and it expands into a card with playback controls and a live audio visualizer. Album art tucks against the camera housing while a track plays. On top of that it carries a small file shelf, so you can park a file on the notch and drag it back out later, plus a few glanceable activities.

What it is not trying to be is a full work console. If you want to compare exact feature sets, check the GitHub repository, because an active open-source project adds and moves things between releases and no blog post stays current. The honest summary as of mid-2026: excellent at the media-and-basics core, lighter on the permission-heavy features like driving other apps during video calls, searchable clipboard history or on-device dictation.

Feature availability changes between releases; the project’s GitHub is the source of truth for what ships today.

If a clipboard history is the piece you actually came for, that is a separate tool category worth understanding on its own. I wrote a plain-language rundown of how the clipboard works on the Mac and what a manager adds, and Boring Notch is not primarily a clipboard app, so pairing it with a dedicated one is reasonable.

#How to delete Boring Notch from your Mac

Removing it is straightforward, and unlike some utilities it does not install a background daemon you have to hunt down. The clean sequence:

1. Quit the app. Open its menu at the notch and choose Quit, or quit it from the menu bar. Nothing should be moved to the Trash while it is still running.
2. Stop it launching at login. Go to System Settings → General → Login Items & Extensions and remove Boring Notch if it is listed, so it does not relaunch after you delete it.
3. Delete the app. Open the Applications folder, drag Boring Notch to the Trash.
4. Clear the leftovers (optional). A few small settings files may remain. In Finder use Go → Go to Folder and look inside the two locations below for a Boring Notch folder, then trash what you find.

# Optional: settings and support files left behind
~/Library/Application Support/    # look for a Boring Notch folder
~/Library/Preferences/            # look for its .plist by name

Then empty the Trash. That is the whole removal. If you are not sure a folder belongs to Boring Notch, leave it: a stray preferences file is harmless, and deleting the wrong thing is the only way this step can bite you. Revoking any permissions you granted is optional too, under System Settings → Privacy & Security, but once the app is gone those grants are inert.

#Is Boring Notch safe?

The honest answer is: reasonably, for a careful user, with one real caveat. The good news is that Boring Notch is open source. Anyone can read the code, and a project with an active community and public history is much harder to hide something in than a closed binary from an unknown vendor. That transparency is a genuine safety argument in its favor.

The caveat is the notarization gap. Because the public builds are often not signed and notarized by Apple, macOS cannot tell you it scanned the binary for known malware, which is exactly why Gatekeeper blocks it. That does not mean the app is dangerous. It means the trust chain runs through the developer and your download source instead of through Apple. So the rule is simple: download only from the official GitHub releases, verify you are on the real project page, and never grab a “free Boring Notch” build from a site that is not the source. A malicious repackage is the actual thing to worry about, not the original.

I went deeper on this exact question, including how to sanity-check a build and what the trade-off really costs you, in is Boring Notch safe. The short version stands here: an open-source, popular notch app from its own repository is a defensible thing to run, as long as you respect the download-source rule and grant permissions deliberately.

#When a paid app is worth it

Mine, so discount the enthusiasm. If Boring Notch covers what you want, keep using it. Free and good is a great place to land, and I would rather you run a notch app you like than pay for one you do not need. Where a paid app earns its price is the permission-heavy layer that open-source projects tend to reach last: driving other apps during calls, a searchable clipboard tray, dictation, sharing pipelines.

That is the gap NotchBay is built for. It does the media-and-activities core (now playing with a waveform, a calendar chip that joins your next meeting in one tap, AirPods battery on connect, camera and mic privacy chips, Caps Lock and Focus status), and then adds the work layer: mute and leave controls for Zoom and Google Meet, a clipboard tray that keeps roughly 60 recent clips with OCR search inside screenshots, on-device dictation built on Apple’s SpeechAnalyzer engine, per-app skins, and drop-to-share that uploads to your own Google Drive and copies a link. Nothing leaves your Mac unless you trigger it: no account, clips and transcripts are never uploaded, and dictation is processed on-device.

The honest limits, because every app here has them: NotchBay requires macOS 26 (Tahoe) and a MacBook with a notch, call controls need Accessibility permission, the Google Meet bridge works through a Chromium browser and not Safari yet, and the tray holds 60 clips plus pinned ones, not an unlimited archive. It is also not open source, so if auditable code is your bar, Boring Notch is the better fit and I will say so plainly. If you would rather weigh it against a different paid option first, NotchBay vs Alcove and the piece on how far you can customize a Dynamic Island on the Mac are the two comparisons I would read next.

#Frequently asked questions