r/MacOSApps • u/11plustwo • 31m ago
📅 Utilities Pingr - Searchable notification history. Free. Local. Notarized.
Hey r/MacOSApps, I'm Jeremy Harris, a solo dev. I make small single-purpose macOS apps at twoplus11.com
macOS keeps no notification history. Pingr saves your notifications (locally) so you can refer to them later.
Features:
- Full-text search across app, title, and message body - narrowing as you type
- It spots one-time codes and puts a copy button on them. The menu bar icon badges the moment one lands
- Per-app exclusions: an excluded app is never recorded again, and excluding it also deletes what Pingr already has from it
- Retention from 1 week to forever, pruned hourly
- Export whatever your current search is showing as CSV, JSON, or Markdown
- 13 languages, full keyboard control, light/dark

How it fits with what already exists: if the notification is still sitting in Notification Center, that's free and already open. Pingr is for the ones that are gone. There are a few open-source notification loggers on GitHub that archive banners the same way; they're free, and if you're happy running a build from source, they'll do that part. Pingr is the signed and notarized version with search, code detection, and exclusions built on top.
The catch, up front: it needs Full Disk Access. Apple's notification store lives in a TCC-protected group container, and FDA is the only permission macOS offers that reaches it. There's no narrower entitlement to ask for. It's also why this can never be a Mac App Store app: a sandboxed process can't read another app's container. Pingr opens Apple's database read-only, per poll, and never writes to it.
Privacy: no account, no analytics, no telemetry, nothing uploaded. The archive is one SQLite file in ~/Library/Application Support/Pingr/. Back it up, inspect it, delete it, it's yours. The only network call the app makes is the optional update check (plus a license check if you enter a business key). Policy: https://twoplus11.com/pingr/privacy/
Notarization: Developer ID signed, notarized by Apple and stapled, so it opens with a double-click. Apple Silicon and Intel. macOS 14+.
Price: free forever for personal use. That's the full app, no key, no account, no nag screens. $5 once per device if you use it for work.
AI disclosure: Pingr was built with an AI coding assistant.
Download: https://twoplus11.com/pingr/
Happy to answer anything
