GitHub desktop notifications on a Mac: every option that actually works

Updated August 2026 · 5 min read · written by the DevNotify team

You would expect that in 2026, GitHub — a company owned by Microsoft, with a first-party editor and a first-party terminal — would ship a native way to get notified on your desktop. It doesn't. There is no official GitHub desktop notifications app for macOS. The GitHub Desktop app itself does not show you notifications either.

If you want a ping on your Mac when someone requests your review, mentions you, or opens an issue that concerns you, these are the four realistic options.

The four options at a glance

1. The browser tab (the default most people settle for)

Keep github.com/notifications open and look at it. It's free and always accurate — but it only works while you remember to look, and a pinned tab costs memory and attention all day. If this describes your current setup, you already know its weakness: review requests arrive while you're heads-down, and you find them hours late.

2. Email and web notifications

Under Settings → Notifications, GitHub can email you for everything: participating, mentions, review requests, CI failures. It works, but email is a poor notification channel for something time-sensitive. Digests batch things together, individual mails drown in your inbox, and neither can interrupt you the way a menu bar badge can.

3. Gitify — the free Electron option

How it works: Gitify is a free, open-source Electron app that sits in your menu bar and polls the GitHub notifications API.

• Pros: free, open source, supports GitHub Enterprise, shows unread count.
• Cons: it's Electron — tens of MB of Chromium resident in memory. Notifications mark themselves read when viewed, which some people love and others find destructive. Development activity has been intermittent over the years.

For many developers, Gitify is good enough. If it works for you, use it.

4. DevNotify — the native option

How it works: DevNotify is a small native macOS menu bar app (built with Tauri, not Electron). You paste a GitHub personal access token with the notifications scope, and it polls every 60 seconds.

• A persistent badge shows your unread count at a glance.
• Click the icon to see your PRs, issues and mentions in one list.
• Click an item to open it on github.com.
• Your token stays on your Mac. Nothing is sent to any server — DevNotify talks directly to api.github.com from your machine.
• ~15 MB resident, versus hundreds of MB for an Electron tray app.

It costs $19 as a one-time license — no subscription. There's also a GitLab variant, and the same token-based approach is covered in our token scopes guide.

Honorable mention: roll your own with a script

If you enjoy scripting, you can poll the API yourself:

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN" \
     -H "Accept: application/vnd.github+json" \
     https://api.github.com/notifications

Wrap that in launchd with a 60-second interval and pipe results into osascript -e 'display notification ...'. It works. You'll spend an afternoon getting pagination, marking-as-read, rate limits and error states right — which is exactly why packaged apps exist.

Which should you pick?

• You get fewer than ~5 notifications a week: keep the browser tab. Seriously.
• You want free and don't mind Electron: Gitify.
• You want something light and native, and will pay once to stop thinking about it: DevNotify.