Growl, once a staple of the Mac desktop experience, has been retired

A Growl notification. (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Growl, once a key part of the Mac desktop experience, is being retired after 17 years. Christopher Forsythe, who acted as project lead, announced the retirement in a blog post on Friday.

Launched in 2004, Growl provided notifications for applications on Macs (it was also offered for Windows) before Apple introduced its own Notification Center. Notification Center was added to macOS (then styled Mac OS X) in the Mountain Lion update in 2012, but it first debuted on iOS a year earlier.

Here's a snippet of Forsythe's announcement:

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