Comment by kdheiwns
12 hours ago
The scary thing to me is how Apple makes you jump through hoops to install or use any sort of app, but when it comes to adding items to your login items, they don't even require you to grant permission.
Tried some little throwaway app and realized you don't need it? Sucks for you. It added itself to your login items and it'll start up in the background every single time you turn on your computer. And it won't even tell you. Thought you deleted the app from your Applications folder? If you didn't check your login items, there's probably some little script that deeply installed itself and it'll reinstall it in the background during your next startup.
Adobe is the fucking worst with this. Their Creative Cloud spyware keeps enabling itself and reinstalling itself so long as you use photoshop. And it'll constantly find ways to turn itself back on. Steam also adds itself to login items, which is fucking annoying because you'll reboot and be hit in the face with game ads. At least it respects your decision when you turn it off, but login items should be opt in, never opt out.
I like the app ‘Lingon X’ I think is the name, to help with this. It’s a viewer/editor for all the startup and recurrent background tasks on your Mac. But also it has a feature to notify you of any edits/additions to the startup/background items that I otherwise wouldn’t have known about.
I try to always install with Homebrew. Because then you can uninstall with the --zap option, for example:
Usually it blows away everything associated with the app, including cached files, configuration in ~/Library and ~/.config, etc. Very useful. It'll leave a non-functional login item which isn't active and can't be active.
I like the app uninstaller included in Forklift. You open Applications folder, and delete an app. A window appears with all the associated files Forklift can find (which is extremely accurate, BTW), and you can uninstall everything you want from there.
For .pkg files, there's UninstallPKG which reads the package manifest and properly uninstalls it.
I would like to take this moment to rage against Apple for shipping that package installer, literally 25 years ago, and never once having apparently even considered a native, out of the box way to uninstall programs that were installed that way.
Speaking of packages, even more embarrassing, Microsoft Windows literally beat them to shipping a first-party package manager. I feel like Apple lives in a fantasy land that the drag’n’drop app install method from the classic macOS is some kind of platonic ideal — never mind that they can’t stop half the apps out there from going outside that paradigm and installing their crap all over the place.
I get notifications that an item has added itself to your login items.
I do as well, but no app should be able to add itself to the login items: ask me or better have me navigate to the login items settings pane and add it manually.