macOS notifications are broken
When Apple released the first beta of macOS Ventura, notifications were almost unusable. That was understandable, given it was an early beta. The experience improved through continued macOS Ventura betas. At some point, though, those improvements stopped, and macOS notifications were left in a state of disarray.
macOS Ventura 13.2 was released to everyone last month, and notifications are still unreliable for both Apple apps and third-party apps. I’ve held out hope that these point-updates would fix the problems, but they haven’t. If anything, notifications have gotten even more unreliable. Some of the issues include:
They get “stuck” in the upper-right of the display They get “stuck” in Notification Center They don’t appear at all They don’t play sound when they’re supposed to, or vice versa They “beach ball,” requiring the app that sent the notification to be force quit Notifications appear 20-minutes late, basically like you’re running on a tape delayThe most annoying of these issues is when notifications don’t appear at all. I’ve had this problem for almost every app on my Mac, including Messages, Slack, Mail, and Twitter. This seems to mean that it’s a system-level issue, although the Mail app is the number one offender in my experience.
I’m not alone in these problems, either. Other 9to5Mac staffers are experiencing the same things. On Reddit, macOS users have regularly complained of notification issues, ranging from the Calendar app to the Weather app and more. One other common problem seems to be that notifications will show a “Not Permitted” symbol over the app icon.