Notch Support

Help and troubleshooting for Notch on Mac, iPhone and iPad. Listed on the App Store as Notch Reminders.

What Notch is

Notch is a calmer way to look at Apple Reminders. It keeps no database of its own — your reminders stay in Apple's Reminders, and everything you see in Notch is your real Reminders data. Apple's own Reminders app keeps working alongside it, on the same reminders, and so do Siri, Shortcuts and every other device you own.

That is the whole design, and it has a practical consequence worth knowing up front: if a reminder looks wrong in Notch, it is almost always because that is what Reminders is reporting. Notch is a window, not a copy.

Requirements

• macOS 14 or later; iOS or iPadOS 17 or later.
• Permission to use Reminders. Notch cannot do anything without it, because there is nothing else for it to read.
• No account, no subscription, no server of ours. An iCloud account is not required either — Notch works fine on local reminders. iCloud is simply what makes your reminders the same on every device, and that is between you and Apple.
• Mac, iPhone and iPad are one app on the App Store, not three — a single download covers all three.

First run

Notch asks for permission to use your Reminders the first time it opens. Grant it and your lists appear immediately; there is nothing to import and nothing to set up.

If you refused by accident, nothing is broken — turn it back on:

• macOS: System Settings → Privacy & Security → Reminders → enable Notch, then reopen the app.
• iPhone or iPad: Settings → Notch → Reminders.

Notifications are asked for separately, and are optional. See Notifications below for what turning them down costs you.

Quick Add and dates

The bar at the bottom takes a whole reminder as one sentence: type Call the desk tomorrow at 9 and Notch files it as a task called “Call the desk” due at 9am tomorrow. The date is lifted out of the title rather than left sitting in it.

All of that parsing happens on your device. Nothing you type is sent anywhere — see the privacy policy.

A reminder with no time stays an all-day reminder.

This is deliberate and it matters. If you don't give a time, Notch files the reminder as all-day, exactly as Reminders would — it does not quietly invent 12:00 and turn it into a timed task in your iCloud data. Notch shows such reminders around midday for readability; the reminder itself is still dateless as to time.

Known limitation: bare ordinals.

“on the 1st”, “the 23rd” and similar are not currently understood, and the reminder is created with no due date at all rather than a wrong one. Write “1 October” or pick the date in the detail sheet instead. Date parsing is English-only.

Notifications

Notch schedules its own notifications rather than writing alarms into Reminders. The reason is that an alarm belonging to Reminders opens Reminders when you tap it, which is not what you want from a reminder you created in Notch — and writing both would give every task two banners.

Consequences worth knowing:

• Notch needs notification permission. Without it, due reminders still appear in the app, but nothing will alert you.
• The next 60 upcoming reminders are scheduled at a time, in chronological order — which in practice covers months, not days.
• A notification whose reminder you have already completed elsewhere is suppressed rather than shown.

On the Mac, turn on “Open Notch at login”.

This is the single most useful setting in the app, and it is off until you choose it — the Open Notch at login toggle in Settings. A reminder created in Apple's Reminders app, or by Siri, while Notch is closed cannot be scheduled by Notch, because Notch is not running to notice it. Opening at login closes that gap. macOS may ask you to approve the login item in System Settings → General → Login Items the first time.

Widgets

Notch has widgets in every size on both platforms, plus Lock Screen widgets on iPhone. You can tick a task straight from a widget, and a widget can be configured to show Today, Upcoming, All or Completed — long-press or right-click it and choose Edit Widget.

A widget looks a few minutes behind.

That is normal and it is the operating system's doing. WidgetKit gives every app a limited refresh budget and decides when to spend it, so a change you just made in the app can take a little while to reach the widget. Opening Notch nudges its widgets to refresh.

Links inside a reminder

If a reminder's notes contain a link, Notch turns it into a pill you can tap on the second line of the row, instead of leaving a wall of URL text. Emails in Spark, Mimestream or Apple Mail, web pages, files, and stories in Prexy all get their own pill.

A file link reveals the file in the Finder rather than opening it. That is a deliberate safety decision, not an oversight: opening a file link would launch whatever it points at, and a reminder is not a place that should be able to do that.

Lists, colours and the sidebar

• Lists come from Reminders, and the coloured dot beside each one is the colour Reminders reports for it.
• The sidebar is the only place lists are created or deleted, and doing either there does it in Reminders — so it shows up everywhere else too.
• The title at the top of the main view is also the filter switcher: click it to move between Today, Upcoming, All and Completed.

The menu bar (Mac)

Notch installs a menu bar extra, so you can check and tick things off without a window on screen at all. It is the same data as the main window, and either can be used without the other.

Appearance

Settings → Appearance holds eight themes and a Light / Dark / System picker. The theme colours the frame — the card outline, the badges, the sidebar glyphs — and deliberately never colours anything that carries meaning: an overdue reminder is red, a note is yellow, and a list's dot is its own colour, in every theme.

Troubleshooting

Reminders access was never asked for, or was refused.

macOS: System Settings → Privacy & Security → Reminders. iOS: Settings → Notch → Reminders. Reopen Notch afterwards.

A list or reminder is missing.

Notch shows what Reminders gives it, so check the same thing in Apple's Reminders app first. If a list is missing there too, it is usually an account that isn't enabled — Reminders → Settings → Accounts. Reminders in an account Notch cannot see (a work Exchange account that is switched off, for instance) will not appear.

Notifications aren't arriving.

• Check notification permission: System Settings → Notifications → Notch, or Settings → Notifications → Notch on iOS.
• Check Due Date Notifications is on in Notch's own Settings.
• On the Mac, turn on “Open Notch at login” — a reminder created while Notch was closed cannot have been scheduled by Notch.
• A reminder with a date but no time is all-day, and does not get a timed alert.
• A reminder set for less than a few seconds away is not scheduled, because the alert would fire in the past.

I completed something and it came back.

Give iCloud a moment. Notch writes the completion to Reminders immediately, but another device that was offline can push an older version of the same reminder back up when it reconnects. This is iCloud's reconciliation, not Notch's.

Something is wrong that isn't here.

Please write: shearm@mac.com. Include your OS version, and whether it happens on one device or all of them.

Privacy, briefly

Notch has no backend, no analytics, no third-party SDKs, and makes no network requests at all — the Mac app isn't even permitted to. Your reminders are Apple's, on your device and in your own iCloud account, and the developer has no access to them. The full statement is on the privacy policy page.