App is running in the background warning message on MacOS 26 Tahoe

Is this for an app that you’re developing?

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Quinn “The Eskimo!” @ Developer Technical Support @ Apple
let myEmail = "eskimo" + "1" + "@" + "apple.com"

Yes, all these applications developed by our team. But also observed similar message appeared in Adobe application too. Upon closing the running application observing the warning message.

Thanks for the context.

This is indeed a new feature in macOS 26 beta. We don’t yet have documentation about it, partly because the exact feature set is in flux.

If you’re seeing this with your apps, I can certainly help you with that. I’ll come back to that below.

If you’re seeing this with apps from other third-party developers, you should contact their support resources about it.

The general idea behind this feature is that apps should quit when the user tells them to quit. That is, an app shouldn’t continue running in the background with no visibility to the user. But macOS is pretty flexible about what that visibility might be. For example, the app might display a status item in the menu bar, show up in System Settings > General > Login Items & Extensions, and so on on. Speaking as a Mac user, this is the sort of thing I like in my apps, and macOS 26 beta is enforcing it at runtime.

So, what does your app do in the background? And how is that background code executed?

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Quinn “The Eskimo!” @ Developer Technical Support @ Apple
let myEmail = "eskimo" + "1" + "@" + "apple.com"

Thanks for your reply.

Regarding to your question, when user clicks the close button, our application needs to gracefully close the connection with our servers. This may take some time. That's why our application will run some more time in the background after clicking the close button.

Is there any documentation available yet on this notification? For example, how long does an application have to clean up and close subprocesses before this appears?

Is there any documentation available yet on this notification?

No, not currently.

For example, how long does an application have to clean up and close subprocesses before this appears?

We haven't documented that time and probably never will*. However, if you experimented with it a bit, you'd find that it's ~60s. However, I think the bigger issue here is that you're thinking about this issue in the wrong way. The right answer here isn't to try and "hide" inside that time (which could change), it's to provide feedback to the user about what's going so that you're not "hidden". App "quit" on macOS is largely cooperative, in that you don't HAVE to terminate immediately. The problem that led to this dialog is apps that appear to terminate immediately but then linger in the background. The "right" answer to that is to stop doing "that" by instead providing feedback to the user about what you're actually doing.

*It's the sort of detail we reserve the right to change in the future.

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Kevin Elliott
DTS Engineer, CoreOS/Hardware