Who makes this, and what it sends.

Who builds it

One developer, working on it in their spare time. There is no company behind FunNotch, no funding, no team, and no plan to sell you anything later. It is free because it costs nothing to give away, not as a trial for something else.

It began as a rebuild of TheBoringNotch, which got to the idea first and is still the better answer if you want software you can read and a community that will maintain it. That comparison is written out honestly on its own page, including the parts where theirs wins.

What it sends

The short version: no accounts, no analytics, no tracking, no crash reporting, no telemetry of any kind. Nothing about how you use the app leaves your Mac, because nothing in the app is written to collect it.

FunNotch makes network requests in exactly two situations, both of which you can see coming:

• The weather widget asks api.open-meteo.com for a forecast. Open-Meteo is a free weather API that needs no account and no API key. If the weather widget is switched off, this never happens.
• Album artwork is fetched from whatever URL your music source hands over — Spotify's artwork server, or your browser's. If you are not playing anything, this never happens.

That is the complete list. Everything else — the shelf, the clipboard, focus sessions, the widgets, the HUD, the game — is entirely local. The app also has a Diagnostics screen that lists every permission it holds and what it uses each for, so you do not have to take this page's word for it.

Why macOS warns you about it

FunNotch is signed ad-hoc, not with a paid Apple Developer certificate. On first launch, Gatekeeper will refuse to open it and tell you it cannot verify the developer.

The honest reason is that a Developer ID costs $99 a year, and this is a free app made by one person. Notarising it would remove the warning entirely, and if FunNotch ever justifies the cost, that is the first thing the money goes on.

What that warning does and does not mean is worth being precise about. It means Apple has not checked this app. It does not mean Apple has found something wrong with it — an unnotarised app and a malicious app produce the same dialog, which is exactly why the warning is worth taking seriously in general. Judge it the way you would judge any unsigned software: on whether you trust where it came from. The install guide walks through opening it, and explains what you are agreeing to when you do.

Getting in touch

There is no contact address on this page yet. A Discord server is planned and the invite will go here when it exists — that will be the place for bugs, feature requests and questions.

In the meantime the changelog is the honest record of what has changed and what is still broken, including a standing list of the app's current limitations.

What it is not

FunNotch is not open source. If being able to read the code matters to you — and it is a legitimate thing to want from software that watches your clipboard — then TheBoringNotch is GPL-3.0 and you should use that instead. Saying so costs this page nothing and pretending otherwise would be worse.

There is also no automatic updater. New versions are announced on the changelog page and nowhere else, so that page is worth a bookmark if you want to know when something changes.