Perpetual "Background Items Added"

Restart your Mac in safe mode. Do nothing and wait 5 minutes. Restart normally.

r bryan wrote:

Since upgrading to macOS 13.x, I've received a sequence of Background Items Added notifications with every restart. Permission for all these is enabled under General > Login items: Allow in the Background:

https://discussions.apple.com/content/attachment/9d12aefc-c250-47d8-bfec-54831f6f3317

Nonetheless, every time I restart, I get another round of notifications. Obviously this is nothing like fatal, but nonetheless, I'd like to suppress the superfluous warnings about things that aren't problems.

I would turn off as many as these as you can bear to live without and compare your results—in an effort to isolate the issue.

no insight or resolve:

Call Customer Support (800) MY–APPLE (800–692–7753)

or on line Apple Support

or call AppleCare Support at 1-800-APLCARE (800-275-2273)

Outside the USA—Contact Apple for support and service by phone

See a list of Apple phone numbers around the world.

Contact Apple for support and service - Apple Support

hollistonma wrote:

I will do as you've suggested and file a bug report.

No need for that.

The problem here is that this feature has absolutely nothing to do with notifications. Perhaps some of the other people reporting this problem had the same misunderstanding. And that would be why most people can't reproduce it.

This toggle switch is actually for VMWare itself. You aren't turning off a notification. You are turning off VMWare. So then, when you want to run VMWare, it seems clever enough to notice that you've turned it off, so it attempts to turn itself back on. That seems reasonable considering that you are trying to run it after all.

And the same applies to all of the other software in the list. You aren't disabling notifications, you are disabling apps. So if there is some important task that you need some of those apps to perform, and you've turned them off, better turn them back on.

In truth, these items should always be turned on. If you install 3rd party software, you installed it because you want to run it. It doesn't make sense that Apple would provide a user interface to disable the correct functionality of 3rd party software, but that's exactly what they've done. Why they've done this, I can't speculate. Well, I can, but I'm not allowed to. 😄

The reason this problem cropped up after Ventura, is that this interface simply never existed before. People who wanted to do this would have had to do it from the command line. I considered doing it in the app I wrote, but I thought it would be too dangerous. I guess Apple didn't feel the same way.

There are some rare occasions where I would consider this to be acceptable. For example, I've turned off all of Google Chrome's automatic update logic. But in this case, I have a very unusual use case. I definitely don't want any Google code running if I'm not running Chrome itself. But Chrome is unusual both for having a background task that isn't required and for not asking the user first to run it. So I feel justified in hacking back in this specific case. I wouldn't do that with any other developers. I'm happy to let Microsoft's background tasks run. Plus, if I used this Ventura interface to disable Microsoft, then Office wouldn't run at all. This is because Apple's interface is all-or-nothing. I can't just disable the auto-update feature but keep the licensing daemon. It is issues that like that lead me to recommend that people never, ever use this interface. Keep everything turned on or uninstall apps you don't want.

Barney-15E wrote:

Well, if you own any Microsoft products, it’s obvious the developer can include lots of detailed information in there background process, Microsoft Autoupdate or Microsoft Licensing Agent.

Maybe the developers will start updating their signing certificates to at least provide useful information.

That’s just how Microsoft named those apps. Even then, they just got lucky by structuring these things somehow that caused the Ventura UI to display them in a readable fashion. I can assure you that none of this is documented in any way.

There is no place in the Developer signature for anything other than the developer name and team ID (which is not provided). Nor is there any dedicated field in the plist file for developers to explain what these are for. Apple requires such fields for things like the camera and microphone access.

This particular technology has always been defined to be background tasks totally hidden from the user. And then one day, Apple displays it to the user. Look at it. Apple even has a field for an icon. When did that become a requirement for launch daemons? Now it makes it look like something is wrong. I display icons in my app when they are available, but I don’t assume they should be available.

There’s no good way to spin this.

To those that have 20 notifications open on boot... not marketing them "CleanMyMac"or "App Cleaner & Uninstaller" but they have removed the leftover launch agents which removed most of the notifications - when you open certain apps they do pop up but all are gone.

Relaunching the apps now gives the notification only once on first launch.

CleanMyMac

Speed -> Optimization -> Launch Agents

App Cleaner & Uninstaller - Free Trial

Startup Programs - (at the bottom of list you can remove launch agents)

This workaround worked for me, thanks Jeff Chapman

I removed related application files from below location

~/Library/LaunchAgents

Macintosh HD/Library/LaunchAgents

and did restart.

I left application files under Macintosh HD/Library/LaunchDaemons hopefully it is not triggering background notification in my case.

Jeremy Bolesky wrote:

Deleting the properties files in the LaunchAgents folders worked for me.

Of course. By doing this you are uninstalling, or rather, breaking your installation of some 3rd party software.

@etresoft Have you seen the described behavior first-hand? Have you tried deleting the launch agents? Do you have any first-hand tests to back up your assertion: "Nope. Not gonna work."

I have not seen this problem in real life. But then, I'm very careful about installing 3rd party software. I don't install the kinds of flaky stuff that most people do. However, I can assure you that I do have extensive knowledge about anything involving launchd tasks.

I would be interested to know if anyone who has actually tried this solution has had a bad outcome.

Technically speaking, they've all had a bad outcome. The "fix" is removing some software that the user most likely installed for some specific purpose. It's just that it will probably be much later when people figure out that some 3rd party software is not working correctly because they've broken it somehow.

I would prefer if people took a more pro-active and mindful approach so they know exactly what they are doing and exactly what the consequences might me. If they do that, then if they decide later that they really did need that software, they will be able to check back with the developer, confirm that it has been updated with a fix, and they can re-install it. But just randomly deleting files? Nope. Bad idea. Every time.

In some case, people disabling these options in the Login Items user interface, and/or deleting files, but then not completely removing the software may actually be causing these repeated notifications. I know that if I were writing software that depended on launchd tasks, I would probably include a "self repair" feature to protect the software from end-user vandalism. I think some of this may be a result of developers actually trying that, but being too aggressive about it.

It would be a very good idea to do a time machine backup before doing this JUST IN CASE. But at the very least @etresoft is wrong in some cases when he says "will have no effect or cause damage."

And therefore, following the logic of proof by contradiction, @etresoft must therefore be correct in some cases when he says "will have no effect or cause damage".

I had this problem and a person on Apple Senior support helped me with it!

Write this into spotlight search:

~/Library/LaunchAgents

Then you simply delete the files that cause the notification issue.

You can alternatively install a cleaning program such as CleanMyMacX or Avast cleanup.

No guarantee it won't cause damage, but if you click on the (i) thingie next to the Login Item in System Preferences, it will bring up the file in the Finder. It appears that the two offending files (at least on my system) are

~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.logmein.GoToMeeting.G2MAIRUploader.plist

~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.logmein.GoToMeeting.G2MUpdate.plist

Good luck!

I worked with apple support and deleted the respective files in Launchagents and launchdaemons and it fixed the problem. I then updated to Ventura 13.2. I've had this problem since I bought this system 1/15/23. I'm glad it's fixed.

In my case, the background items notifications are coming up for applications I have already uninstalled, so removing the associated LaunchAgents files will not do any harm. In fact, removing the LaunchAgents files does appear to have eliminated the issue for some apps.

However, one app, XQuartz, which happens to be an Apple app, still generates these notifications even after deleting the associated LaunchAgents files. It's also worth noting that the UI for disabling background items (in System Settings) has no effect - toggling a background item off can actually exacerbate the issue, causing the notifications to pop up repetitively for several days.

A better user interface would allow the user to delete background items for apps that have already been deleted. There's no effective way to do this, as far as I can tell.

firanto wrote:

Is there any way to prevent that particular notification to show without removing the apps from launch and background configurations?

Sometimes, uninstalling and reinstalling the app will make it work correctly. Some apps seem to find that they have been broken when you disable them, and they reinstall the background item, triggering the notification again.

This worked for me as well. I had missed the ones in LaunchDaemons so problem persisted. Clearing out those as well, did it for me. Two reboots and all is well so far. Thanks.

Apple says it's a KNOWN ISSUE. If you want Apple engineers to act quickly on a "fix", call to be added to the case as I did yesterday (1/20/23). Be the squeaky wheel.

Like I said, call Apple.