Perpetual "Background Items Added"

Ha. That made me chuckle!

No software related to a Galaxy phone? Have you checked LaunchDaemons too? Make sure you’re checking both root and user Libraries.

I started getting this message for Adobe items, no idea why. I deleted com.adobe.ARM.de23d1e3aa2d00ce38d73f10fcbdc8dcaaaf6be989610710a1ddda77.plist and it has stopped.

I have also had this same problem. I've turned this off for specific items and they keep reappearing every time I start the app again. Very frustrating and makes me wish I hadn't upgraded to Ventura.

Is there another workaround?

slps01 wrote:

I am also fairly convinced that this is a Ventura problem

Certainly.

otherwise I would not have an Allow in Background for an item entitled "Joseph Siegrist".

Joseph Siegrist was the original developer for LastPass. However, it has been sold and incorporated at least a couple of times since he would have ever shipped software signed under his own name. So your copy of LastPass must be very old.

I did try trashing a bunch of apps that showed up on the notifications whenever I started my computer or opened System Setting, and that may have solved at least a part of the problem.

And what did you lose with that?

I understand this is a problem. But I think it is a very bad idea to just go randomly deleting files. Did you have important passwords saved in LastPass? Maybe they're gone forever now.

I only experienced this problem after temporarily doing a restore from a Time Machine backup from an Intel Mac mini to a newer M1 Mac mini. Once I no longer wanted to keep the Time Machine restored copies of other users on the M1 Mac mini, I deleted those users. I continued receiving those pop-ups even after trashing the app files for the applications whose names were supposedly causing them. Only after I trashed their launch files (from the locations I specified earlier) did the pop-ups completely vanish. I have not since reinstalled those apps.

I mean it would be really, really helpful to have a detailed description

of your specific problem. Describe exactly what changes, if any, that

you've made in this new interface. Describe exactly what those

notifications say. Screenshots are immensely helpful. Please be

thorough. If you get 5 notifications, 5 screenshots would be really

nice.

Here is what happens to me.

I receive this notification when I open VMWare Fusion:

I will then go to Systems Settings and find that the notification for VMWare Fusion is set to notify (despite the fact that I had previously turned it off):

When I turn off the notification I receive the following message:

Once I provide my password, the notification is turned off:

I then use and quit VMWare Fusion. When I do so, the Systems Setting preference no longer lists VMWare:

However once I use VMWare again, I receive the same notification:

I can either "rinse and repeat" or just deal with the annoying notification coming up when ever I use VMWare Fusion. Interestingly this behavior doesn't occur with other apps on my MBP.

This is a Ventura issue..cropped up when I installed Ventura. Am currently running 13.0.1. One one account (Guest account is turned off). Shutting down the MBP and restarting doesn't address the issue.

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

hollistonma wrote:

I have now set VMWare back to "enable". Unfortunately the question still remains: how do I stop the notifications from occurring everytime I use VMWare Fusion?

If you leave it enabled, then you shouldn't get any further notifications of that fact. It sounds like you were only getting the notifications because you had disabled it. Then, when you ran VMWare fusion, it reloaded the software, which triggered the notifications.

Surely it's not meant to notify me everytime it starts up that somethings been added?

No. You should only get those notifications when some software loads a persistent background task. Normally this happens only when you install new software.

To clarify, are you saying that you have enabled VMWare and you are still getting notifications that VMWare has been installed every time you run VMWare, and you have stopped disabling VMWare? You have to be absurdly specific about these things.

This is why we always tell people to start their own questions, respond to requests for more information, and always, always avoid the "me too" posts. It might make you feel good when you click that button "Me too" button, or post a reply that sounds somewhat similar. But this thread is a good example. Start with a good question on November 2nd, add 30 confused "me too" replies, and 8 weeks later nobody is any closer to knowing anything about what is going on with your computer.

Phantom Steve wrote:

Same here. It's ridiculous.

Half of the items on my list are unknown to me — it would help if there was some info — like which software relies on which background item.

I decided to turn some off — and the problem got worse !!!

Why would you turn them off? You installed software to do some function for you, and that software does some of that function in the background.

They aren’t doing anything you didn’t ask them to do on your behalf. It would be great if when you installed a piece of software, it told you exactly what it was installing and what it would be doing, but they don’t the only difference between any previous OS and Ventura is Apple is showing you what things are running in the background. All of those apps were running the background processes prior to Ventura, it’s just that nobody told you they were.

BBP6 wrote:

13.1 does not help the situation even though it was supposed to.

It was? Who said that?

Come on Apple. Get it fixed.

You are not speaking to Apple here. This is a user-to-user technical support forum for Apple products.

You can send general product feedback to Apple here, or file an official bug report using the other "feedback" site.

[Edited by Moderator]

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.

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.

Webxsite wrote:

Some of us use our Macs to actually do work and we have alot of apps running

It is not the nature of your use or the number of apps you are running. It is the nature of those apps. Most apps don't have any problems. It sounds like Ventura may have exposed some incorrect behaviour by those apps. Another possibility is that apps may be manually re-enabling themselves in response to users turning them off in that new UI.