BT Battery Notifier
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Support

Updated 28 August 2026

Leia em português

This page covers what you normally need to use BT Battery Notifier on a Mac and on Android. If what you are looking for is not here, write in — every message is read by a person.

Direct contact

developer@brorlandi.xyz

Answered within 2 business days. English, Portuguese or Spanish.

What the app does

BT Battery Notifier shows the battery level of the Bluetooth devices you have already paired, and tells you when one of them is running low or has disconnected. Wireless earbuds do not have a single battery — left, right and case — so the app treats each one as its own reading, with its own alert threshold.

Requirements

On the Mac

I cannot find the app's window

It has no window and no Dock icon: it lives in the menu bar at the top of the screen, near the clock. Click the battery icon to open the device list; the gear button inside that list opens Settings.

If the icon is not there, the menu bar may be full — macOS hides the icons that do not fit. Quit another menu bar app, or free up room in System Settings › Menu Bar.

Permissions

The app asks for two permissions on first launch, and both are required:

If you denied either one, you can grant it later:

The "Finish setting up" banner inside the app disappears on its own once both are granted.

A device shows no percentage

The battery level is not computed by the app: the accessory itself reports it. Some Bluetooth devices simply never publish that value, and when they do not, neither the app nor macOS has anything to show. It is worth checking whether the same accessory shows a battery level in the system's own Bluetooth menu — if it does not appear there, it will not appear here.

Many accessories also report their battery only occasionally. The app keeps the last known reading and shows the time it arrived next to it, so you can tell how recent that number is.

Choosing what appears in the menu bar

Settings has a sidebar: one item per device at the top, and below them Alerts, Menu bar, Phone, General and Archived. Each device's own page has two checkboxes — Show in the menu bar and Show in the popup — and that is also where you change its icon. Menu bar lets you pick icon and percentage, icon only, or percentage only.

Archiving a device

Devices you do not want to track — a guest speaker, a rental car — can be archived with the Archive button on their own page. They leave the menu bar and the list, and stop notifying. Archived, at the bottom of the sidebar, holds all of them, each with a Restore button.

The MacBook itself appears on the list with its own battery, and arrives archived by default — restore it if you want it beside the rest.

Tuning the alerts

Alerts holds the rules that apply to every device without rules of its own:

Any device can break away from that default: open its page and uncheck Follow the default alerts. Whatever you leave alone keeps inheriting the general rule, so one pair of headphones can always speak up while the keyboard stays silent.

Starting with the Mac

Launch at login in Settings registers the app at login. It can also be switched off in System Settings › General › Login Items.

A device is charging

When a device reports that it is plugged in, its row gets a green bolt, and the time of the last reading is replaced by how long is left until it is full — full in 1h05, for instance. Not every device reports this: Bluetooth accessories almost never do, and the ones that do are the Mac itself, your phone and your watch.

Wrong icon on a device

The icon is inferred from the device type the accessory declares, and some declare something generic. Click the icon inside Settings and pick another from the list — headphones, earbuds, keyboard, mouse, trackpad, speaker, game controller and so on.

Uninstalling

Drag BT Battery Notifier from the Applications folder to the Trash. Settings and history live in the app's private container and go with it.

Linking your phone to your Mac

What it is for

macOS cannot read the battery of a paired phone, and it will never read a watch's. Since version 2.0, the phone app sends those numbers to the Mac app: in the panel, under a divider, the devices the phone can see show up. In return, the phone receives the MacBook's battery and its devices'. It is optional and stays off until you link the two.

How to link them

On the Mac, open Settings and go to Phone: a QR code appears with a six-character code below it. On the phone, go to Settings › My Mac and scan the QR, or type the code. Each one shows the other's name before the link is sealed — check it and confirm. The code is good for five minutes and works once.

Do the same earbuds show up twice?

They should not. A device known to both sides appears once, with the reading from whichever side has it connected at that moment; if both do, the device you are using wins. The matching is done by address and by name, so renaming a pair of earbuds on only one side can, in rare cases, split the row in two — the fix is to give it the same name on both.

What travels, and where to

Only the name, the battery level, whether it is connected, whether it is charging, and the time of the reading. All of it encrypted with AES-256-GCM before it leaves the device, with a key derived from the pairing code that exists only on your two devices. The relay in the middle passes sealed bytes along and cannot open them. Details in the privacy policy.

Disconnecting

From either side: Disconnect, on the phone's My Mac screen or in the Phone pane of the Mac's settings. That erases the key on both devices and deletes the state held by the relay.

The Mac is off and the numbers are gone?

They are not gone. After a while with no news, the Mac's devices start showing on the phone as disconnected, with their last reading and the time it was taken — exactly like any device that has gone out of range.

On Android

Nearby devices permission

The app needs Nearby devices to see what is already paired and read the battery. It does not scan for new devices and does not ask for location access. To grant it after denying: Settings › Apps › BT Battery Notifier › Permissions.

The widget is not updating

The widget refreshes on its own, with no permanent notification in the status bar. When it stops changing it is almost always the system's battery optimisation suspending the app: under Settings › Apps › BT Battery Notifier › Battery, choose Unrestricted. Opening the app forces an immediate reading.

Widget size and order

The widget grows by the cell: a narrow row shows four readings, a bigger block shows eight. The choice belongs to each widget: press and hold it on the home screen and tap Settings to decide which gauges it shows and in what order — your Mac's devices and the MacBook's own battery included, once you have linked the two. A widget you never configured follows the app's own list.

Galaxy Watch and other Wear OS devices

The watch reports its own battery through the app installed on your wrist, and the Wear OS tile shows the other devices. If the numbers on the watch go stale, open the app on the phone once to get the two talking again.

Privacy

There is no account, no analytics and no ads, and by default nothing leaves the device — with no pair configured the app makes no network connection at all. The one exception is phone-to-Mac sync, which you turn on yourself and whose content travels encrypted end to end. The details are in the privacy policy (português).

Reporting a problem

Write to developer@brorlandi.xyz. It helps a lot to include:

Refunds

Mac App Store purchases are processed by Apple, so refund requests go through reportaproblem.apple.com. Before that, write in — if it is something that can be fixed, it gets fixed.