Why Apps Start Automatically When You Boot Your Mac

A frequently asked question is why many apps will launch and windows will open when you start up your Mac. While many answer this question by pointing to Login Items, most people are asking this because they simply overlook a checkbox when shutting down or restarting their Mac.



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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me tell you why when you start your Mac up lots of apps and windows open up automatically.
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So a very common question asked online is when you startup your Mac why do all of these apps and these windows automatically open. Is there a way to have your Mac startup with nothing going on? Well, there's a lot going on inside this question but the first thing I want to address is that most Mac users don't ever really need to shutdown their Macs at all. So if you don't shutdown your Mac you never need to start it up. A restart is kind of the same thing but you also only should rarely need to restart your Mac. Maybe after a major software update or installation. A lot of Mac users still shutdown their Macs when they're done using it at the end of the day and you really don't need to do that. Just put your mac to Sleep. If you have a MacBook model then the only time you really need to do more than put your Mac to sleep is if you're storing it for a long period of time. If you have a Desktop Mac then you obviously need to shutdown your Mac to move it somewhere since you're unplugging it. Other than that just let it sleep. In fact Macs do a lot of maintenance while they're sleeping and if you don't let them sleep they'll do that maintenance while you're using your Mac causing your Mac to be slower. Even doing something as simple as indexing the files on your drive for Spotlight so you can search and find them could take days or weeks if you're always shutting down your Mac as soon as you're done using it and only starting it up again when you start using it. Instead if you let it sleep it will take care of that while you're not using your Mac at all making it faster for you while you do use it.
Okay, so besides that why when you restart your Mac do all of these apps and windows open up. A lot of the advice you'll find online is wrong. For instance, they'll tell you to go to System Preferences and then go to Users & Groups and from there go to Login Item and look to see which apps are set to automatically start. But chances are you're not going to find the problem here. Many of you may see nothing at all in this list. You almost certainly won't see apps like Pages and Safari and Mail in this list. They won't be set here to startup automatically. There are other ways for apps to startup automatically but it is unlikely that this is the problem that people are talking about.
Another thing that people will tell you to look for is if you go to System Preferences and then General there is a setting here, Close Windows When Quitting an App. This seems like it may address the problem. But this just has to do with quitting the app. So, for instance, if you have two Pages documents open if you were to suddenly quit Pages with Command Q and then restart Pages it would automatically open up those two windows with those two documents. This is a great feature but it doesn't apply when you're restarting or shutting down. Even though restarting and shutting down does, of course, quit apps, even if you have this turned on when you restart you may find Pages will open up again with those two windows.
So what's actually causing all of your previous apps to restart automatically. After all you may think that if you choose restart or shut down it quits all apps and when you start up the Mac you'll see no apps open. But you've got to pay careful attention when you choose one of these. For instance, if I choose Shut Down notice that I've got this dialogue box here and there's a checkbox. The Checkbox says Reopen windows when logging back in. So this is actually what's doing it here. This overrides that System Preference in General and will actually reopen all of the apps you had and all the windows in them. To prevent this from happening simply Uncheck this. The same exact thing appears when you go to Restart or to Log Out. You'll get this checkbox here. So if you've got ten apps running and you want to restart your Mac and not have those ten apps running then you've got to uncheck this box. The best thing about it is that it remembers your last setting. As a matter of fact I don't have to restart here. I can actually cancel and I can see that when I choose this it will, in fact, remember that last setting. So you could change it now so the next time you need to restart or shut down it actually will be set as you like.
Now there's one exception to this and that's the Finder. If you've got Finder windows open, like here's one, here's another, and you've got these setup then Finder, even though of course it is quitting the Finder when you shut down, everything has to quit and it should be obeying the rules in System Preferences and this checkbox here. In fact Finder windows will reopen. So the Finder kind of remains constant between when you shut down or restart your Mac and when it starts up again. Of course you could easily click the red button here to close any Finder window. Doing that before or after you restart is fine. You could also go to File and where it says Close Window that changes to Close All if you hold the Option key down. So the keyboard shortcut Option Command W will close all Finder windows. That actually works in most apps.
Another thing that adds to the confusion here is the fact that Mac apps have a fundamental difference in how they work from Window apps. So if you come from Windows you may think that if you are in an app, like here I am in Pages, and you click the red X here that Pages quits. But you can see it doesn't. You simply close a document window from Pages and Pages stays open. This is really handy because it allows you to close a document or window and then open a new one without having to relaunch the app again. The same is true in Safari. Here I've got a Safari window open and if I click the X there Safari remains open. Now I can go and use History Bookmarks or whatever I want to open another Safari page. So if you want to actually Quit Safari what you need to do is choose Quit Safari in the Safari menu or just Command Q.
Now in Pages if I use Quit Pages or Command Q it's going to obey the setting here in System Preferences, General, as to whether windows are closed when quitting the app. So since I have this turned Off it won't actually close the window. So I quit Pages and then I start Pages up again and it will automatically bring that window with that document back. You can, however, override this on a case by case basis. If I go to Pages, Quit Pages, and hold the Option key down you could see it says Quit and Close All Windows. So Command Option Q will do that. Now when I start Pages again you could see just prompting me to open a new document here that the Pages document was closed. Oh by the way, if you have this checked then, in Pages, you'll see that the Quit command with the Option key is actually Quit and Keep All Windows now. So it does the opposite of the System Preferences setting.
So I hope this gives you a better understanding of why windows and documents may automatically open when you Restart or Shut Down and startup your Mac and why document windows may reappear when you launch an app.
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