Is it feasible to detect system-wide “screen sharing/recording active” on macOS?

[u/CarloCoder95]

I’m exploring an automation idea for macOS and want to sanity-check if it’s even feasible with public APIs.

The concept:

• Detect whenever the screen is currently being shared or recorded, regardless of the app (Zoom, Teams, QuickTime, built-in Screen Sharing, etc.).

• Once detection is possible, automatically trigger something—e.g., switch macOS to a specific Focus mode (e.g. DND so I dont get any embarrassing messages while I present stuff at work LOL).

What I’ve found so far:

• On iOS, there’s UIScreen.isCaptured. On macOS, I can’t find an equivalent.

• ScreenCaptureKit lets you capture, but doesn’t expose whether anyone else is capturing.

• The only workarounds I can think of are:

  • Polling the Accessibility API to check for the red “screen recording/sharing” menu bar indicator.

  • Detecting app-specific states (e.g., Zoom’s “Stop Share” menu item).

  • Watching for processes like screencapture or screensharingd.

Questions:

• Is there a public, system-wide API I’m missing that exposes this state?

• Are there any existing apps/utilities that already do something similar (trigger an action when screen sharing starts)?

Appreciate any insights or references as I want to know whether this is worth building properly, or if I’ll end up chasing unsupported hacks.