Dynamic Island on Mac: can you really get it?
Updated 29 September 2026.
Short answer: not the real one, and no app can give it to you. The iPhone’s Dynamic Island is a system feature that Apple has not brought to macOS, and third-party apps have no access to it. What you can get is a panel that opens from the notch and borrows the idea: music controls, a tray for files, your next event. It looks alike, but it is not the same thing, and it is worth knowing where the resemblance ends before you install anything.
What the Dynamic Island is on the iPhone
It is the area around the camera cutout that, since 2022, grows and shrinks to show what is going on: a timer running, a song playing, a ride on its way. It is not an app. It is the operating system drawing there, and other apps can ask it to show something through a dedicated programming interface called Live Activities.
So it is two things at once: a shape on the screen, and an agreement between the system and the apps. On the Mac the second one is missing.
Why the Mac is different
The MacBook notch is a cutout that houses the camera, and macOS simply keeps the menu bar around it. There is no equivalent of the iPhone’s Live Activities, and no third-party app can draw inside the cutout: on a MacBook with a notch, that area is an absence of screen, not black screen.
What these apps do is something else, and honestly the only thing possible: they open a borderless window tucked under the cutout, drawn to match its exact measurements. At rest it blends into the notch; when you open it, a panel drops down. The effect is convincing, but it comes from somewhere else.
What you can actually get
- A panel that opens from the notch when you move the pointer to it, and disappears again at rest.
- Controls for what is playing, with title and artwork, without opening the player.
- Cards that appear under the notch when something happens: a timer ending, your next event, a finished download, the battery charging. This is the part that feels most like Live Activities.
- A place to park files, which the iPhone does not even have.
What you cannot get, and nobody can give you
- Other apps’ Live Activities. On an iPhone it is the ride app that tells the system the car is arriving. On the Mac that agreement does not exist: a notch app can only show what it manages to find out by itself.
- Face ID. The MacBook camera does not have the iPhone’s depth sensors. Some notch apps offer a face unlock using the regular camera, but it is a different technology with a different level of assurance.
- System integration. The Dynamic Island is part of iOS. In the Mac notch you are looking at an app’s window, however well made.
Do you need a MacBook with a notch?
No, and this is the counter-intuitive part. On a Mac without a physical cutout — an iMac, a Mac mini, an external display — these apps draw a shape of the same proportions against the top edge of the screen and behave the same way. On a MacBook that has the notch, the panel hides inside it at rest and you do not see it at all.
The MacBooks with a notch are the 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro from 2021 on and the 13- and 15-inch MacBook Air from 2022 on.
How to do it, in practice
You need one of these apps. We compared ten of them on a separate page, Mac notch apps compared, including ours, but in short:
- Free from the App Store: NotchBox, with a $4.99 Pro upgrade, runs on macOS 13 too.
- Free and open source: Boring Notch or Atoll. Boring Notch is not notarized, so macOS blocks it on first launch until you allow it.
- Paid: NotchNook ($25 once for five Macs, or $3 a month), Alcove ($14.99, macOS 15), and FloatPill, ours, €14.99 once with seven days free.
One thing the Dynamic Island does not do
Worth saying, since this whole page is about resemblances: the Mac notch can do something that would make no sense on an iPhone. In FloatPill, a YouTube video playing in your browser moves into a small player under the notch, picking up at the exact second the tab had reached, and goes back to the browser when you are done. It is an idea that comes from having a big screen and many windows open, not from copying a phone. Here is how it works.
If you are looking for the Dynamic Island on your Mac, this is probably what you actually want: not a copy, but for that black rectangle to stop doing nothing.
Try FloatPill, 7 days free Compare all the apps
More guides: How to use the MacBook notch · Mac notch apps compared. Dynamic Island and Face ID are trademarks of Apple. FloatPill is not affiliated with Apple.