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Push Notifications

Get notify events as native notifications on your phone and desktop.

Events posted with "notify": true can show up as a native browser or phone notification — no ntfy app, no third-party service needed. It sits alongside ntfy and outgoing webhooks in the same fan-out.

Opt-in is per project, per device: you turn it on separately for each project and each browser or device you want notified on. Only you see and control your own devices — teammates never see or manage each other's.

Turning it on

From a project's Settings tab, find the Push notifications card and click Enable on this device. Your browser prompts for notification permission — allow it. From then on, notify: true events for that project arrive on that device.

Disable on this device stops notifications for that project on that device only. It doesn't affect any other project you've enabled push for on the same device.

iPhone and iPad

Safari only exposes push notifications to a web app added to the Home Screen — a regular Safari tab can't receive them. To enable push on iOS (16.4 or later):

  • Open Get Butters in Safari.
  • Tap Share, then Add to Home Screen.
  • Open Get Butters from the Home Screen icon, not from Safari.
  • Go to a project's Settings and enable push as above.

If you open the card from a regular Safari tab, it tells you to add the app to your Home Screen first rather than showing a broken enable button.

What a notification shows

  • Title — the event's title.
  • Body — the event's description, or its category if there's no description.
  • Tapping it opens the event's URL if it has one, otherwise your project's feed. A URL longer than 1 KB also falls back to the feed.
  • Each notification is tagged with its event, so a repeat delivery of the same event replaces it instead of stacking.

Get Butters makes one delivery attempt per event; the push service itself holds and retries the delivery to your device for up to 24 hours, so it still arrives if your device was briefly offline.

Send test, removing devices

The Settings card lists Your devices for that project: each device's label (like "Chrome on macOS"), when it last received a push or its last error, and two actions:

  • Send test sends one test notification and shows whether the push service accepted it. It normally appears within seconds; if it doesn't, check the device's notification settings.
  • The trash icon removes that device from this project's push list. It doesn't touch the device's push registration for any other project.

Troubleshooting

  • "Test sent" but no notification appears. The push service accepted it, so your operating system is holding it back. Check that notifications are allowed for your browser at the OS level — on a Mac, System Settings → Notifications → Google Chrome (or your browser) → Allow notifications, with an alert style other than None — and that Focus / Do Not Disturb is off. Also look in Notification Center; it may have arrived silently.
  • "Couldn't turn on push: …" Enabling failed in the browser — the message after the colon says why (for example, the push service was unreachable). Try again; if it keeps failing, reload the page.
  • "This browser doesn't support push notifications." Either the browser has no push support, or its service worker couldn't start (some private or locked-down browsing modes block them). Try a regular window.
  • "Notifications are blocked for this site." You (or your browser) denied the permission prompt. Allow notifications for this site in your browser's settings, then reload the page.
  • A device disappears from the list on its own. The browser told the push service it's no longer interested — for example its data was cleared, or the OS revoked the subscription. Get Butters notices the next time it tries to send and removes the device automatically. Enable push again on that device if you still want notifications there.
  • A teammate stopped getting notifications after leaving the team. That's expected — as soon as someone is removed from the organization, their devices stop receiving pushes for that org's projects immediately.
  • Opening Get Butters with no connection shows a small offline page with a Retry link instead of the browser's error page.