Droppy has lived at the top of the Mac for a long time now: a shelf for files, a clipboard that remembers, music controls, timers, and a store of droplets that turn the notch into whatever you need. The one thing it could not do was leave the desk with you. As of this week it can. Droppy for iPhone is on TestFlight, it is free while it is in beta, and installing it takes about a minute.
What syncs, and in which direction
The app is built around six stores, and each one is a two-way street. Change something on the Mac and the phone catches up on the next pass. Change it on the phone and the Mac does the same. Nothing joins your library without you approving it on the phone first, and nothing is uploaded that a server could read.
- Clipboard
- Everything your Mac copied, with the app it came from. Search it, filter to favourites, and copy anything back to the phone's clipboard.
- Basket and Shelf
- The files you staged on the Mac. Open one, rename it, or hand it to another app through the share sheet.
- OCR
- Every text grab, still attached to the image it came from. The phone can add to the history from its own camera.
- Notes
- The same notes the Mac's shelf widget keeps. Write one on the phone and it is on the shelf.
- Cloud links
- Every Droppy Cloud share link you made, from either device, with a copy button and a real delete.
- Your devices
- Revoke a phone, rotate its credential, or leave the library. Your license card lives here too.
The clipboard store is the one most people notice first, because it answers the question the iPhone and Mac have never quite answered together: where did that thing I copied go? The full story of how that works, and where it stops, is in the clipboard sync guide. The Mac side of the same feature is covered in clipboard history on the Mac.
Fifteen droplets on the phone
Droplets are the modular tools inside Droppy on the Mac. On the iPhone they come in four flavours, and the flavour tells you what the phone can actually do with each one. Some steer the Mac. Some only show what the Mac knows. Four run on the phone itself and do not need the Mac at all once you are paired.
Reach across and change something. Now Playing is the notch player on a phone, with artwork, progress, timed lyrics and transport. Audio Control moves your Mac's volume, mute and output device from the sofa. Meetings mutes the mic or kills the camera on the call running on the Mac.
Pomodoro sets the focus timer in your notch on a tape that ticks under your thumb, and High Alert keeps the Mac awake for a while or indefinitely.
Read only, on purpose. System Stats shows CPU, memory, GPU, disk and battery as a snapshot per sync, not a live graph. Weather shows your Mac's forecast in the phone's units. Agents shows which coding agents are running on the Mac and what each is doing, with no paths and no prompts.
One of these writes back. Calendar puts reminders and calendar events in one list and lets you tick a reminder off from the phone. Notes can create, edit, pin, search and delete. Obsidian reads and searches the vault you linked on the Mac, reading only.
No Mac needed. OCR points the camera at a page and pulls the text out on the device. AI Background Removal lifts the subject out of a photo on the phone, and nothing is uploaded. Converter handles images, PDF pages and audio, with a target size if you need one. Voice Transcribe reads the transcripts your Mac made, and the phone never records.
Fifteen droplets in total. The grouping is the honest part: a read-only droplet says so, rather than pretending the phone can push a button it cannot.
If you want the Mac side of any of these, the Droplet Store lists all of them with exactly what each one does. The phone inherits the ones the Mac has switched on.
Pairing takes about a minute
Open Droppy on the Mac and go to Settings, General, Droppy Sync. Create a Sync Library if you have not already. Choose Pair iPhone and the Mac shows a QR code with the link written under it. Scan it with the phone, or paste the link, then confirm on the phone. Camera is the only permission the app asks for. The code works once and then expires.
The encryption is the part worth understanding. Your Mac makes the root key and keeps it in its Keychain. That key reaches the iPhone inside the pairing code you scan, which is why the scan happens in person. It never reaches a server. Every record is then sealed on the device with its own key derived from that root, so the server only ever holds what it cannot read. I wrote the longer version in how pairing and the encryption actually work.
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Do I need a Mac? | Yes. An unpaired iPhone stays on the pairing screen on purpose. |
| What does it cost? | Nothing. The app is free on TestFlight. Sync needs an active Droppy license on the Mac, the same one-time purchase that covers two Macs. |
| Can Droppy read what syncs? | No. Records are sealed on the device with keys the server never sees. |
| iPad or Apple Watch? | Not yet. This build is iPhone only, on iOS 26 or later. |
| Is Droppy Cloud encrypted the same way? | No. A share link is a normal HTTPS link, by design, so anyone you send it to can open it. |
The share sheet is the quiet star
Anything you can share on the iPhone, you can put on your Mac. Pick My Droppy in the share sheet and choose Clipboard, Basket or Shelf. If the Mac is not reachable at that moment, the item waits and goes on the next launch instead of vanishing. The other option is Cloud link, which uploads and hands you a Droppy Cloud link without opening Droppy at all. It is on the clipboard before the sheet closes.
Siri works the same way. There are nine Shortcuts actions, six of them with a phrase that needs no setup, so you can say Paste to Droppy or Start my Droppy focus timer and it happens. Any of them fits the Action button. The details, including which actions take a parameter, are in the share sheet and Siri guide.
Live Activities and widgets
The phone does not only receive. Pomodoro timers and High Alert sessions show up as Live Activities on the iPhone, with timer controls in the Dynamic Island and on the Lock Screen. You can also place any droplet on the Home Screen as a widget, including a dedicated Now Playing media widget. That makes the phone a second surface for the things Droppy already puts in the notch, which is roughly what Live Activities, the Droppy way argued a Mac deserved in the first place.
What the beta is and is not
TestFlight is Apple's own beta program. Installing takes a minute, the app is free, and updates arrive through TestFlight. The app is built for iOS 26 with Liquid Glass, a soft scroll edge on every list, and Reduce Motion honoured everywhere. If your Droppy license lapses, the pairing survives and Droppy says so, instead of quietly unpairing the phone.
If you find a bug, post it on The Trench and tag it iOS, or say so in Discord. Both come straight to me, and the board tells you when your report has been built. That is the whole loop: pair once, keep the library on both ends, and tell me where it breaks.