How to Remove Deleted Apps from Login Items on Mac
Reading Time: 3 minutes When you uninstall or delete an app on your Mac, you would usually like all of its files to be gone. But this often doesn’t happen – some strays get left behind. One of the places you can see that there are files left behind is in the Login Items. You may see many apps listed under the Allow in the Background section, and some of those items listed might be from apps you have uninstalled. In this article, we’ll tell you how you can remove those uninstalled apps from Login Items on your Mac.
Remove uninstalled apps from “Allow in the Background”
Login Items on your Mac
To see the list of apps allowed in the background:
- Open System Settings (Preferences) on your Mac and click on General.
- Click on Login Items, then check out the Allow in the Background section.
Remove uninstalled/deleted apps from Login Items’ Allow in the Background
If you see something listed from an app that you know you have deleted, you should be able to remove it from the list. For example, I had an app called BlueStacks installed on my Mac but uninstalled it a while ago.
Find the files to delete
First, you have to actually find the file to remove it. You will be looking for a .plist file, which is a preference file. For more on this file type, see Plist File, What is It? What Does It Do?. There are a few places you can look for these files:
/library/startupitems~/library/startupitems/library/launchagents~/library/launchagents/library/launchdaemons~/library/launchdaemons
You may or may not have all of these folders. In my case, I found the .plist file in /library/launchdaemons.
To search for the stray file:
- Open Finder, and from the top menu bar, click on Go.
- Select Go to Folder, then type in one of the above paths. Click on the result.
- Look for a
.plistfile that has the name of the app in its name.
- For me, the file was located in
/library/launchdaemonsand was namedcom.BlueStacks.AppPlayer.bstservice_helper.plist.
- After you locate the file, right-click or Control-click on the file to bring up a menu. Select Move to Trash. If you are concerned about deleting a file, you could instead move the file to the desktop so you could easily put the file back later.
- You may need to enter your password to move the file to the trash.
- To see the changes to the Login Items, restart your Mac. You should see that the deleted app is no longer listed under Login Items’ Allow in the Background on your Mac.
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