Turn the notch into a live Dynamic Island. Replace the built-in volume HUD with an iPhone-style pill. No Dock icon, no fuss. Just the tiny stuff macOS should have shipped with.
Hover the top of your screen and the notch drops into a black panel with artwork, transport controls, and a seek bar. While audio plays the collapsed pill shows the album cover on the left and a live waveform on the right — frozen when paused.
Hardware volume keys now pop a tall pill on the right edge of the screen — the native macOS indicator is suppressed cleanly, without killing OSDUIHelper. The pill shows the active output device: built-in speakers, AirPods, generic Bluetooth, USB, or AirPlay.
No Dock icon. A small menu bar glyph lets you toggle either feature, open Settings, or check for updates. Auto-updates via Sparkle land silently in the background when a new version ships.
Grab the latest release from GitHub. It's signed with a Developer ID and notarized by Apple, so Gatekeeper opens it without warnings.
Open the disk image and drop the app onto the /Applications shortcut.
On first launch, NotchFree will ask for Accessibility permission. It needs this to intercept the hardware volume keys so it can replace the native HUD. No other keystrokes or clipboard data are read.
Toggle Open at Login from the menu bar and you're done. It runs invisibly from then on.