GitHub notifications not showing in the menu bar

Updated August 2026 · 5 min read

You installed a GitHub notifier — DevNotify, Gitify, or similar — and the menu bar icon either never appears, appears but stays at zero, or vanishes after a reboot. The causes differ, so work down this list in order; the first three cover most reports.

1. The icon exists but is hidden by macOS menu bar overflow

If you run many menu bar apps (or use Bartender/Ice), new icons get pushed behind the notch or into overflow on MacBooks with a notch. Hold ⌘ and drag the icon left out of hiding, or check inside your menu bar manager's hidden section. This is the single most common "it disappeared" report — nothing is broken, the icon just ran out of room.

2. Login items didn't survive the reboot

macOS: System Settings → General → Login Items & Extensions → make sure the app is listed and enabled under "Open at Login". Windows: check Task Manager → Startup apps. If you launched the app once by hand from Downloads, it may never have registered itself — move it to /Applications (macOS) or Program Files first, then enable it here.

3. Token expired or missing the right scopes

A notifier polling GitHub's API stops updating silently when its personal access token expires (fine-grained tokens can have short expirations) or was created without the notifications scope. The app still runs — it just polls against an error response. Re-issue a token with notifications scope and sign in again. We documented exactly which scopes are needed in our token scopes guide. Quick test: paste this in a terminal with your token —

curl -s -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_TOKEN" https://api.github.com/notifications | head -5

An empty array means the token works and there genuinely are no unread notifications. A 401/403 means the token is the problem.

4. Polling paused during sleep

Laptops that sleep don't poll. Most notifiers catch up on wake within a minute, but some versions of some apps needed a manual refresh. If the count is stale right after waking, click the icon and force-refresh before assuming it's broken.

5. Notifications genuinely filtered out server-side

Check github.com/notifications directly. If the website also shows nothing, the problem isn't the client — it's your subscription settings: you may be unwatched from the repos involved, or filtering by "Inbox" vs "Done". Verify there first, then debug the client.

6. Corrupted app state

Rare, but repeated failed logins can leave a client in a half-signed-in state. Sign out inside the app, quit fully (⌘Q, not just closing the window), reopen, and sign in again. On macOS also check that the app hasn't been quarantined after a manual download: right-click → Open once, so Gatekeeper approves it.