[addicted]

I first got into the Mac eco system in the mid 2000s, so I don’t know the entire history of notifications there, but I remember that Growl was pretty much the defacto Mac standard by the late 2000s.

Growl and a particular packaging software that provides auto updates had basically become a prerequisite for Mac apps at a certain point.

[armadsen]

The auto updates software you're thinking of is Sparkle, and it's still going strong. Still by far the most common way for Mac developers to do automatic updates for apps distributed outside the Mac App Store. https://sparkle-project.org

[pram]

Yes, but notification center, added in Mountain Lion, was an exact clone of the iOS 5 notification center. Which at the time was argued to be stolen(!) from Android's notification center design. So did Android steal Growls implementation, as well? That is what is being implied.

[jevinskie]

The update framework is Sparkle and is still widely used. You’re quite right that these two frameworks made important chunks of app functionality Just Work.