Pickup for Mac

Android calls on macOS.
Your phone rings, your Mac shows who is calling. Accept, decline, dial. Nothing else in the way.

Why Pickup

See who is calling, right on your Mac. Answering and placing calls from the Mac was an iPhone-only perk. Pickup brings it to Android: a call comes in, a banner appears with the name from your contacts, the number and a photo, and you accept or decline with one click. Dial from the menu bar, search your contacts by name, or click any phone number link on the web.

No bloatware. Pickup does calls, and the things that belong around calls. No account, no cloud, no app to install on your phone, no analytics, no network access at all. It speaks the same Bluetooth Hands-Free Profile your car kit uses, so Android already knows how to talk to it.

Features

• Incoming call banner with caller name (from your Contacts), number and photo, with Accept and Decline.
• Call window with the running time and End Call, plus a note when a second call is waiting.
• Dial from the menu bar: a Phone-style popover with a collapsible keypad and search by name. Arrow keys and Return, or just type digits and the keypad opens by itself.
• Phone number links: click a tel: or callto: link anywhere and Pickup places the call on your phone (always after a confirmation).
• Missed call notifications, a global shortcut to open the popover from anywhere, launch at login.
• Reconnects by itself when your phone goes out of range, and after the Mac wakes from sleep.
• Native Liquid Glass design for macOS 26, light and dark, English and German, keyboard and VoiceOver friendly.

Requirements

• A Mac with Apple Silicon running macOS 26 (Tahoe) or newer.
• An Android phone that is paired with your Mac over Bluetooth. Pickup uses the standard Bluetooth Hands-Free Profile (HFP), so it should work with phones that offer it. It is developed and tested with a Google Pixel 9 Pro (Android 17); other phones are untested.

Install

Pickup is in early development (0.x). Signed and notarized builds and Homebrew arrive with 1.0.

From a release (0.x)

1. Download Pickup-<version>.dmg from the Releases page, open it and drag Pickup to Applications.
2. Early releases are not signed with an Apple Developer ID yet, so macOS blocks the first start. Open System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll to Security, click Open Anyway next to Pickup and confirm. Or, in Terminal: xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Pickup.app.
3. Start Pickup. A phone icon appears in the menu bar.

With Homebrew (from 1.0)

brew install --cask macx/tap/pickup

From source

You need Xcode 27 and the tools in docs/DEVELOPMENT.md.

git clone https://github.com/macx/pickup.git
cd pickup
PICKUP_NO_SANDBOX=1 scripts/build-app.sh   # runs the quality gate first; PICKUP_SKIP_VERIFY=1 skips it for a quick local build
open App/.build/Pickup.app

Quick start

1. Pair your phone with the Mac: System Settings → Bluetooth.
2. Allow calls for the Mac on the phone: in your phone's Bluetooth settings, open the paired Mac and switch on Phone calls (it appears for a moment right after pairing).
3. Click the Pickup icon in the menu bar → ⋯ → Settings and choose your phone. Allow Bluetooth when macOS asks.
4. Allow Contacts (caller names and search) and Notifications (missed calls) if you want them.
5. Optional: make Pickup the default for phone links and record a global shortcut.

Call yourself from another phone to see it work.

Privacy

• No network access. The app opens no network connections and links no networking frameworks; this is checked in the build gate.
• No third-party code in the app and no analytics or telemetry.
• Your contacts are read on your Mac only and kept in memory, never written to disk or logs.
• Local logs redact phone numbers and contact names; dialled digits from the keypad are never logged.
• Links and pasted text cannot dial silently: tel: links ask first, and service codes (*, #) such as call forwarding are only accepted from the keypad.

Honest limitations

• The conversation stays on your phone. Pickup is a remote control for calls, by design. macOS does not hand the Bluetooth call audio to third-party apps on current Macs, so using the Mac as the speakerphone is not possible.
• One phone at a time, one call shown in full (a waiting call is displayed, not switched to yet).
• Phone numbers are shown in a simple format; some German landline numbers appear as one block of digits.
• No call history and no SMS yet.

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome. Pull requests go to main, titles follow Conventional Commits (feat: …, fix: …), and every user-facing string needs an English and a German translation. Build, test and release details are in docs/DEVELOPMENT.md; the checks every change must pass are described in docs/TESTING.md. CLAUDE.md holds the same rules for AI-assisted changes.

License

The code is released under the MIT License (see LICENSE). The name Pickup and the app icon are not covered by the license (see TRADEMARKS.md). The icon uses artwork from Lucide (ISC); see THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md. Icon and brand assets: docs/ICON.md, docs/brand.

© 2026 David Eiken