Apple Notes▌

by sirmews
Access and search your Apple Notes and iCloud Notes easily with this app. Manage your notes securely and efficiently.
Access and search local Apple Notes databases.
best for
- / Finding forgotten notes and ideas
- / Getting AI help with personal knowledge stored in Notes
- / Cross-referencing information across your note collection
capabilities
- / Retrieve all Apple Notes from local database
- / Search through notes by content or title
- / Read full content of specific notes
- / Access notes metadata and organization
what it does
Connects Claude to your local Apple Notes database so it can read and search through your existing notes. Requires macOS and full disk access permissions.
about
Apple Notes is a community-built MCP server published by sirmews that provides AI assistants with tools and capabilities via the Model Context Protocol. Access and search your Apple Notes and iCloud Notes easily with this app. Manage your notes securely and efficiently. It is categorized under productivity.
how to install
You can install Apple Notes in your AI client of choice. Use the install panel on this page to get one-click setup for Cursor, Claude Desktop, VS Code, and other MCP-compatible clients. This server runs locally on your machine via the stdio transport.
license
MIT
Apple Notes is released under the MIT license. This is a permissive open-source license, meaning you can freely use, modify, and distribute the software.
readme
Apple Notes Model Context Protocol Server for Claude Desktop.
Read your local Apple Notes database and provide it to Claude Desktop.
Now Claude can search your most forgotten notes and know even more about you.
Noting could go wrong.
Components
Resources
The server implements the ability to read and write to your Apple Notes.
Tools
The server provides multiple prompts:
get-all-notes: Get all notes.read-note: Get full content of a specific note.search-notes: Search through notes.
Missing Features:
- No handling of encrypted notes (ZISPASSWORDPROTECTED)
- No support for pinned notes filtering
- No handling of cloud sync status
- Missing attachment content retrieval
- No support for checklist status (ZHASCHECKLIST)
- No ability to create or edit notes
Quickstart
Install the server
Recommend using uv to install the server locally for Claude.
uvx apple-notes-mcp
OR
uv pip install apple-notes-mcp
Add your config as described below.
Claude Desktop
On MacOS: ~/Library/Application\ Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json
On Windows: %APPDATA%/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json
Note: You might need to use the direct path to uv. Use which uv to find the path.
Development/Unpublished Servers Configuration
"mcpServers": {
"apple-notes-mcp": {
"command": "uv",
"args": [
"--directory",
"{project_dir}",
"run",
"apple-notes-mcp"
]
}
}
Published Servers Configuration
"mcpServers": {
"apple-notes-mcp": {
"command": "uvx",
"args": [
"apple-notes-mcp"
]
}
}
Mac OS Disk Permissions
You'll need to grant Full Disk Access to the server. This is because the Apple Notes sqlite database is nested deep in the MacOS file system.
I may look at an AppleScript solution in the future if this annoys me further or if I want to start adding/appending to Apple Notes.
Development
Building and Publishing
To prepare the package for distribution:
- Sync dependencies and update lockfile:
uv sync
- Build package distributions:
uv build
This will create source and wheel distributions in the dist/ directory.
- Publish to PyPI:
uv publish
Note: You'll need to set PyPI credentials via environment variables or command flags:
- Token:
--tokenorUV_PUBLISH_TOKEN - Or username/password:
--username/UV_PUBLISH_USERNAMEand--password/UV_PUBLISH_PASSWORD
Debugging
Since MCP servers run over stdio, debugging can be challenging. For the best debugging experience, we strongly recommend using the MCP Inspector.
You can launch the MCP Inspector via npm with this command:
npx @modelcontextprotocol/inspector uv --directory {project_dir} run apple-notes-mcp
Upon launching, the Inspector will display a URL that you can access in your browser to begin debugging.
License
This project is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for details.
Source Code
The source code is available on GitHub.
Contributing
Send your ideas and feedback to me on Bluesky or by opening an issue.
FAQ
- What is the Apple Notes MCP server?
- Apple Notes is a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server profile on explainx.ai. MCP lets AI hosts (e.g. Claude Desktop, Cursor) call tools and resources through a standard interface; this page summarizes categories, install hints, and community ratings.
- How do MCP servers relate to agent skills?
- Skills are reusable instruction packages (often SKILL.md); MCP servers expose live capabilities. Teams frequently combine both—skills for workflows, MCP for APIs and data. See explainx.ai/skills and explainx.ai/mcp-servers for parallel directories.
- How are reviews shown for Apple Notes?
- This profile displays 10 aggregated ratings (sample rows for discoverability plus signed-in user reviews). Average score is about 4.5 out of 5—verify behavior in your own environment before production use.
Ratings
4.5★★★★★10 reviews- ★★★★★Shikha Mishra· Oct 10, 2024
Apple Notes is among the better-indexed MCP projects we tried; the explainx.ai summary tracks the official description.
- ★★★★★Piyush G· Sep 9, 2024
We evaluated Apple Notes against two servers with overlapping tools; this profile had the clearer scope statement.
- ★★★★★Chaitanya Patil· Aug 8, 2024
Useful MCP listing: Apple Notes is the kind of server we cite when onboarding engineers to host + tool permissions.
- ★★★★★Sakshi Patil· Jul 7, 2024
Apple Notes reduced integration guesswork — categories and install configs on the listing matched the upstream repo.
- ★★★★★Ganesh Mohane· Jun 6, 2024
I recommend Apple Notes for teams standardizing on MCP; the explainx.ai page compares cleanly with sibling servers.
- ★★★★★Oshnikdeep· May 5, 2024
Strong directory entry: Apple Notes surfaces stars and publisher context so we could sanity-check maintenance before adopting.
- ★★★★★Dhruvi Jain· Apr 4, 2024
Apple Notes has been reliable for tool-calling workflows; the MCP profile page is a good permalink for internal docs.
- ★★★★★Rahul Santra· Mar 3, 2024
According to our notes, Apple Notes benefits from clear Model Context Protocol framing — fewer ambiguous “AI plugin” claims.
- ★★★★★Pratham Ware· Feb 2, 2024
We wired Apple Notes into a staging workspace; the listing’s GitHub and npm pointers saved time versus hunting across READMEs.
- ★★★★★Yash Thakker· Jan 1, 2024
Apple Notes is a well-scoped MCP server in the explainx.ai directory — install snippets and categories matched our Claude Code setup.