Send a notification from your Mac to your iPhone

Two different situations

macOS has no built-in command that makes an iPhone buzz, so every working method sends the message through a notification service. The right one depends on where the alert comes from.

• Your own script or command. You control the code, so it can call a notification service directly. One line of curl is enough.
• An app you do not control. A video editor, a backup tool, a download manager, or an AI client only posts a notification on the Mac. There is nowhere to add a command, so the notification itself has to be forwarded.

From a script: ntfy

ntfy is a free, open-source notification service with an iPhone app. Install the app, subscribe to a topic name of your choosing, and publish to it from the Mac:

curl -d "Backup finished" ntfy.sh/your-private-topic

The message appears on the phone a moment later. Headers add a title and a priority:

curl \
  -H "Title: Release build" \
  -H "Priority: high" \
  -d "Tests passed, archive uploaded" \
  ntfy.sh/your-private-topic

Notify when a long command ends

Chain the publish onto the command. && runs it only on success; a semicolon runs it regardless, which lets you report the exit status:

# Notify only on success
make release && curl -d "Release build finished" ntfy.sh/your-private-topic

# Notify either way, with the exit status
./long-job.sh; curl -d "long-job exited with status $?" ntfy.sh/your-private-topic

If you do this often, put a small wrapper in ~/.zshrc. It runs whatever you pass it, publishes the result, and preserves the original exit code so scripts that depend on it still work:

notify() {
  "$@"
  local code=$?
  curl -s -d "$1 finished with exit code $code" ntfy.sh/your-private-topic > /dev/null
  return $code
}

# Usage
notify make release

From a script: Pushover

Pushover is a commercial alternative with its own iPhone app. Instead of a shared topic name it uses an application token and a user key, so only you can publish to your devices. At the time of writing it costs $4.99 once per platform after a 30-day trial and allows 10,000 messages a month.

curl -s \
  --form-string "token=YOUR_APP_TOKEN" \
  --form-string "user=YOUR_USER_KEY" \
  --form-string "message=Export finished" \
  https://api.pushover.net/1/messages.json

Choose Pushover if you want authenticated delivery without running your own server, and ntfy if you want something free that can also be self-hosted.

From an app you do not control

None of the above helps when the alert comes from an application. You cannot add curl to an export that finishes in a video editor or to a backup tool's completion alert. What many of those apps do have in common is that they post to macOS Notification Center.

NotiFerry forwards from there. It is a menu-bar app that watches Notification Center for new entries and publishes them to an ntfy topic for you, so the same ntfy app on your iPhone receives alerts from any Mac app that posts a normal notification. There is nothing to script per app, you choose how much of the text is sent, and individual apps can be switched off. The setup guide takes about five minutes.

The two approaches combine well. A script can post an ordinary Mac notification, and the forwarder carries it along with everything else:

osascript -e 'display notification "Export finished" with title "Render queue"'

macOS shows these under Script Editor, which must be allowed to notify in System Settings before the first one appears.

Which to use

If every alert you care about comes from code you wrote, a script is all you need and NotiFerry adds nothing. If some of them come from apps, forwarding covers those without replacing your scripts. For the wider field, including Hermes and Apple's own features, see the comparison of Mac-to-iPhone notification apps.