What is distnoted?

distnoted (sometimes shown as distnoted.xpc.daemon) is one of the basic building blocks of macOS.

What is distnoted?

distnoted stands for "distributed notification daemon". It passes messages between programs on your Mac. These are not the alerts you see in the top-right corner. They are hidden messages that programs use to talk to each other.

What kind of messages?

These are messages between programs. For example:

• When you change a system setting, distnoted tells all apps that the setting changed
• When the network goes up or down, the right programs hear about it
• When you switch between light and dark mode, apps find out so they can update

Thousands of these messages flow through distnoted every minute during normal use.

How is it different from notifyd?

distnoted handles one layer of system messages. notifyd handles a different layer. Neither one controls the alerts you see in Notification Centre.

Does it use many resources?

Normally no. It is a lightweight message passer. If a program has a bug and sends too many messages, distnoted may use more processor time.

Should you worry?

No. It is one of the oldest and most important macOS background processes.

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