Get Claude Code Notifications on Your Phone

The desktop ding solves the wrong half of the problem. A notification on your Mac is useful when you are sitting at it — but the whole promise of an agent like Claude Code is that you can hand it twenty minutes of work and go be somewhere else: another room, a walk, the coffee run, the school pickup. For that, the alert has to reach your pocket.

We have covered desktop notifications and copy-paste hook scripts in detail already. This guide is entirely about the phone: three reliable ways to get a push notification when Claude Code finishes or needs your input, and how to keep those pushes from becoming noise.

When Phone Push Beats a Desktop Ding

The economics are simple. Claude Code runs are getting longer — a big refactor, a test-fix loop, or a subagent fan-out can work for many minutes without needing you. The expensive failure mode is not the agent working; it is the agent sitting idle behind a permission prompt you did not see because you had already wandered off. A phone push turns that dead time into, at worst, the length of your walk back to the desk.

Option 1: ntfy — Free, Open Source, Five Minutes

ntfy is publish-subscribe over plain HTTP: pick a topic name, subscribe to it in the ntfy app for iOS or Android, and anything that sends an HTTP request to that topic pops up on your phone. No account is required on the public server, and you can self-host it later if you want.

Sending a push is one command: curl -d 'Claude Code is done' ntfy.sh/your-secret-topic. Wire that into a Stop hook so it fires when Claude finishes, and into a Notification hook so it fires when Claude is waiting on a permission prompt — the exact JSON is in our hook recipes post.

One caution: topics on the public ntfy server are protected only by their name, so treat the topic like a password — alex-cc-x7k2q, not claude. Anyone who knows the name can send to it and read it.

Option 2: Pushover — Polished and Predictable

Pushover has been the boring, dependable choice for personal push notifications for over a decade. Create an account, grab your user key, register an application to get a token, and send with a single request: curl -s -F token=YOUR_APP_TOKEN -F user=YOUR_USER_KEY -F message='Claude needs input' https://api.pushover.net/1/messages.json.

What the small one-time app purchase buys you is control: per-notification priority levels, quiet hours that actually work, and an emergency priority that can bypass Do Not Disturb for the rare run you truly must not miss.

Option 3: Telegram — Free and Already Installed

If Telegram is already on your phone, a private bot is a push channel with no new apps at all. Message BotFather to create a bot and get its token, send your new bot a message, read your chat id from the getUpdates endpoint, and from then on every push is: curl -s https://api.telegram.org/botYOUR_TOKEN/sendMessage -d chat_id=YOUR_CHAT_ID -d text='Done'.

The bonus over pure push: it is a chat thread. Your notification history is scrollable, searchable, and synced to every device Telegram runs on.

Keep It From Becoming Noise

Phone pushes are higher-stakes than desktop dings — they interrupt dinner. Three rules keep them welcome.

Split done from needs-you. Use two topics or two priority levels: a finished run is low priority and can wait; a permission prompt blocking the run deserves the buzz.

Do not alert on short runs. A push for a forty-second task is spam. Gate the hook so it only fires when a session has run longer than a few minutes — or only for sessions you flag as long ones.

Respect your own quiet hours. ntfy and Pushover both support scheduling and priority rules; an overnight batch job should report in the morning, not at 3 a.m.

If You Are at the Mac, Skip the Setup Entirely

Away from the desk, the recipes above are the answer. At the desk, you do not need any of them:

Set up one phone channel this week and the pattern sticks: start a long job, stand up, live your life. The terminal can find you now.