Perpetual "Background Items Added"

I turned some off to see what would happen.

The problem was worse.

Turning them back on and it's worse than before I experimented.

I realise they have always been there.

Still — having items called John Seward or Jon Stovell is no help at all.

As a result, the feature is absolutely 100% useless. And irritating.

Phantom Steve wrote:

Still — having items called John Seward or Jon Stovell is no help at all.

You are supposed to Google those names. They are the names of developers who paid $99 to join the Apple Developer program but don’t have enough credentials to get a business account.

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.

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.

Barney-15E wrote:

It’s probably because those Microsoft items have a GUI part. It mostly runs in the background, but there are interface parts to both.

Yes, of course. But there was never any requirement for these tasks to have a user interface. It isn't fair to denigrate certain tasks and make them more confusing when they haven't done anything wrong.

etresoft wrote:

Barney-15E wrote:

It’s probably because those Microsoft items have a GUI part. It mostly runs in the background, but there are interface parts to both.

Yes, of course. But there was never any requirement for these tasks to have a user interface. It isn't fair to denigrate certain tasks and make them more confusing when they haven't done anything wrong.

Who’s denigrating them. Apple just shows that they are running in the background. There sure seem to be a lot of users who think that list indicates something is wrong, but it isn’t meant to be.

Maybe all of the developers should have always been publishing a complete list of everything that is installed where, and what it does for the user. Oh, and how to remove it. And, if it places a completely useless status menu item, provide a way to disable that without having to remove the app completely (re: Garmin).

Developers are not completely innocent in this debacle.

Barney-15E wrote:

Who’s denigrating them.

Apple.

Apple just shows that they are running in the background.

But Apple's doing more than that. Some of these entries have descriptive names and pretty icons. Some only have developer names that are impossible to cross-reference. Some only have an (Apple) executable name, omitting the most important part.

None of this is based on any active choice or design decision by the developer. This is the user interface designed by Apple. There is no requirement or expectation that these things have an icon. There is no requirement or expectation that these items are separate app bundles with meaningful names. There is no requirement that they be stand-alone tools or apps. It is perfectly acceptable to use scripts and/or Apple's own tools. All of Apple's documentation on this topic is 100% technical. There is no hint of any kind of user-facing information or concerns. And then one day, Apple adds this user interface with lots of user-facing data expectations.

Apple doesn't even make any recommendation about the key identifier, the label, other than to recommend that it be the name as the name of the plist. It is only convention to make labels easily readable and identifiable that software developers, even malware developers, rigidly adhere to. Yet this one key, useful identifier is the part that Apple omits.

There sure seem to be a lot of users who think that list indicates something is wrong, but it isn’t meant to be.

Indeed. Do you think it is the responsibility of the developer to have some knowledge of the behaviour of its users?

Maybe all of the developers should have always been publishing a complete list of everything that is installed where, and what it does for the user. Oh, and how to remove it. And, if it places a completely useless status menu item, provide a way to disable that without having to remove the app completely (re: Garmin).

Developers are not completely innocent in this debacle.

I completely agree. But Apple never made any kind of installation/uninstallation frameworks for doing any of that. It was the responsibility of each developer to do it their own way. That is, unless they released software in the Mac App Store. For Mac App Store apps, Apple always required that Login Items be optional. So there was an expectation that the software should run properly even if the user rejected its request for a login item.

What I'm complaining about is this sudden, undocumented, change in the terms and conditions of the user experience. It's straight up not fair to developers. And it also poor behaviour to put end users in the middle and have them do the dirty work.

I have no idea of the issues involved in the relationship between Apple and its developers, and I don't know why I should really care. I raised this problem (and others had the same problem) because I had transferred my files over from my MacBook Pro to a new MacBook Air (I had to install Ventura on the Air to make the transfer). After I made the transfer of the files, I started receiving notifications that certain apps were running in the background. The notifications appeared and reappeared when I opened System Settings>Login Items or when I restarted my computer. The problem did not exist on the MacBook Pro. Whether or not it was a good idea, the problem has (for the most part) disappeared when I deleted the files from the Launch Agents/Daemon folders in the Library. This action does not seem to have affected any of the apps installed on my computer (yet). I still think that this is a software glitch in Ventura, but if it reappears, I will just have to live with it until Apple fixes it. Also, I know that this is an Apple Community forum, but I would hope that someone at Apple might look at it from time to time.

I have no idea of the issues involved in the relationship between Apple and its developers, and I don't know why I should really care. I raised this problem (and others had the same problem) because I had transferred my files over from my MacBook Pro to a new MacBook Air (I had to install Ventura on the Air to make the transfer). After I made the transfer of the files, I started receiving notifications that certain apps were running in the background. The notifications appeared and reappeared when I opened System Settings>Login Items or when I restarted my computer. The problem did not exist on the MacBook Pro. Whether or not it was a good idea, the problem has (for the most part) disappeared when I deleted the files from the Launch Agents/Daemon folders in the Library. This action does not seem to have affected any of the apps installed on my computer (yet). I still think that this is a software glitch in Ventura, but if it reappears, I will just have to live with it until Apple fixes it. Also, I know that this is an Apple Community forum, but I would hope that someone at Apple might look at it from time to time.

And, nobody here has figured out why that happens to some people, but not others. It doesn't seem to be the particular background item because some have similar items and one gets repeated requests and others don't.

Since many don't see the repeated requests, it doesn't sound like something inherent in the OS (but still could be fixable in the OS).

I don't know if it has been suggested nor if it will work, but I thought maybe resetting TCC might trigger whatever is needed to remember. But, I also imagine it could make it worse. In Terminal,

tccutil reset all

Everything that must ask permission will ask for permission, again (Camera, Microphone, etc). My hope would be that it will start recording the approvals correctly.

These background app permissions may not be related to TCC at all. Etresoft may know the answer to that.

Thop80418 wrote:

Hello Jeff Chapman,

This worked for me; clearing those two folders in Macintosh HD, emptying trash, and restarting cleared those items from Allow in the Background. Thank you for posting this!

Now, the software you installed to provide you some capability doesn’t work anymore. There was a reason you installed the software. If you are no longer using the software, you should uninstall it using the uninstaller provided by the developer. If you are still using that software, it won’t work as it was designed.

The developer doesn't always provide an uninstaller. For example, for a couple of years my employer had us using LogMeInInc's GoToMeeting for videoconferencing, so it was installed on my personal machine as well (our license covers installs on personal machines) and was still there in my Time Machine backups when I bought my new Mac a couple of weeks ago. So it was on the new Mac running Ventura 13.1, and I noticed this same odd behavior, and it motivated me to try to uninstall GTM. But there is no uninstaller. LogMeInInc's online page simply says to drag it to the Trash and empty, so I did that. That did NOT stop the messages about GTM adding 2 items that can run in the background. I searched in vain for LaunchAgents and LaunchDaemons to delete, and there are none. So since the app is gone, I have no idea where these "items" are coming from, they appear to be unstoppable.

I noticed similar behavior with OneDrive, which I wanted to (temporarily) uninstall as completely as possible in order to be able to move my home directory to an external drive without errors. Again, no uninstaller. Drag the app to the Trash and empty, and delete some directories in ~/Library (which, as it turns out, did not exist on my system). I noted when logging in as my alternate admin user that the notifications kept coming, so I searched for launch agents / daemons to delete. In this case, there were some, but deleting them did not stop the notifications.

I'm not too bothered by this, especially in the case of OneDrive since it is software I will be using, but I thought I would mention this as a data point. The persistence of these notifications seems quite odd, and a little annoying in the case of GoToMeeting, which as far as I can tell has no trace left on my system (no files that i know of that belonged to the app) except in the Login Items.

Barney-15E wrote:

That’s easy. I don’t install it because it is most likely crapware.

It's easy if you can choose what software you want to run. In my case, my employer makes the choice for me. When they decided to stop using GoToMeeting, they made us use MS Teams instead. OneDrive has been a constant, and earlier versions used to work okay, but no longer. I agree it is crapware, it does not function as advertised (very little that Microsoft puts out does, hope I can say that here)... but my only choice other than installing it on my home machine is to not work from home at all.

but my only choice other than installing it on my home machine is to not work from home at all.

I guess there's that, but I wouldn't do work on my personal computer. I would require the company provide me with a computer to work from home.

Using your personal computer for work leaves it liable to search should your employer be sued or criminally investigated.

I guess there's that, but I wouldn't do work on my personal computer. I would require the company provide me with a computer to work from home.

They're a university, and no way would they do that - they haven't the resources to provide faculty with a second computer to take home. I have had their computer at home before - but because of their security measures, it is much less convenient to use there and lugging it back and forth is unacceptably cumbersome.

Using your personal computer for work leaves it liable to search should your employer be sued or criminally investigated.

Of course, but that's a chance I'm willing to take. I do not store sensitive documents on the local machine - even the one at work - except in OneDrive, and then only as long as they are needed. That's one reason it's important to me to get OneDrive working properly. The currently supported version does not seem to work properly under Ventura. If I cannot solve this on my own I will get our IT department involved after the holiday break.

If you have to install something that comes on a package installer, but no uninstaller, you can use Suspicious Package to view what and where items will be installed.

Interesting. I've never heard of Mothers Ruin Software. How do I know I can trust that their product doesn't contain malware?