Droppy started by borrowing an idea from the iPhone. Live Activities, the little timers and now-playing pills that sit in the Dynamic Island, were the feature macOS never got, so Droppy built them into the Mac's notch. Today the loop closes. The Mac's timers go back to the iPhone as real Live Activities, and every droplet can sit on the Home Screen as a widget.
Every droplet, a widget
Long-press the Home Screen, add a widget, choose Droppy, and pick a droplet. A Weather widget shows the Mac's forecast in the phone's units. A System Stats widget shows the snapshot from the last sync. A Notes widget shows what is on the shelf. The Now Playing widget is the one most people will place first: artwork and the current track for whatever the Mac is playing, with a tap that opens the full player.
The widget carries the same read or act boundary as the droplet behind it. A widget for a read-only droplet is a glance. A widget for a control droplet opens the control. That keeps the Home Screen honest, which is a thing I care about more than it sounds: a widget that looks tappable and does nothing is worse than no widget.
What the Mac is playing, on the Home Screen. Artwork and track, from Apple Music, Spotify, YouTube Music via Kaset or a browser tab. Tap for the full player with progress, lyrics and transport.
Is the Mac busy. CPU, memory, GPU, disk and battery as of the last sync. A quick answer to whether a render finished, without opening the laptop.
The note you keep going back to. The shelf's notes, on the Home Screen. Tap to open and edit; the change is on the Mac's shelf when you get back to it.
Is the agent still working. Which coding agents are running on the Mac and what each one is doing, with no paths and no prompts. Useful for a long Claude Code or Codex run you left at the desk.
Widgets update on each sync, and immediately on the same network. They are glances, not live graphs, so they do not cost the Mac's battery.
Timers in the Dynamic Island
Start a Pomodoro session on the Mac, or from the phone, or by saying Start a focus session with Droppy, and the timer appears as a Live Activity on the iPhone. In the Dynamic Island it is a compact countdown. Long-press it and the expanded view has the controls. On the Lock Screen it is a full card with the remaining time, so a glance at the phone tells you how long the block has left without touching the Mac.
High Alert works the same way. When the Mac is being held awake, the phone shows a Live Activity with an infinity indicator for the indefinite mode or a countdown for a timed one, and a control to stop it. The two activities are built as a family: the same alignment, equally sized controls, and motion that follows the phone's Reduce Motion setting. If you have used the Mac's own lock screen cards, described in a Mac Lock Screen that is useful before you log in, these are the same cards on the other device.
| Surface | Pomodoro | High Alert |
|---|---|---|
| Dynamic Island, compact | Countdown | Infinity or countdown |
| Dynamic Island, expanded | Countdown with stop | Stop control |
| Lock Screen | Full timer card | Status card with stop |
| Siri | Start, stop, check | Start, stop, check |
| On the Mac | Notch HUD and lock screen card | Notch chip and lock screen card |
Sync that keeps up
A widget that shows stale data teaches you to ignore it. Version 2.0 fixes the cause. Sync now carries live encrypted updates, so a change on the Mac reaches the phone as it happens rather than on the next scheduled pass. When the Mac and phone share a network, they also open a direct connection between them, which is what makes a Now Playing widget change tracks at the same moment the notch does. Away from that network, updates still arrive through the relay, sealed on the device the same as everything else.
The same release adds optional two-way file sync for the Shelf and Basket, with coloured markers on the Mac showing which basket a file belongs to. It is off by default because files are bigger than clipboard entries, and you should choose to pay for that traffic. When it is on, a file dropped on the Mac's Basket is in the phone's Basket store, and a photo shared from the phone is on the Mac's shelf.
The smaller things in 2.0
Library navigation was redesigned, with selection, bottom search controls, previews and feedback toasts reworked. Files imported from the Files app now land in the Basket or Shelf you chose rather than the wrong one. Transfers use less memory and handle large files better. Converter imports no longer overlap. And the phone can customise the Mac's widget dock: reorder the tools under the shelf from the phone, with save feedback so you know it took. Localisation expanded to fifteen more languages across the app.
All of it rides on the pairing described in the pairing guide. If you paired an earlier build, 2.0 updates through TestFlight and keeps the pairing.