Spotlight Shows "Helper Apps" That Are Inside Main App Bundle That Are Not Intended to Be Launched By The User

What’s the recommended way to get these out of the Spotlight App list on macOS Tahoe?

Why are you using "/Contents/Applications/"? That's not one of our documented locations (see the list here) and, ironically, I think we started using it so that it WOULD be indexed. Have you tried storing these components in a different directory, specifically "Contents/Helpers"?

*Xcode uses it for its embedded apps like Instruments.app which are designed to run independently.

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Kevin Elliott
DTS Engineer, CoreOS/Hardware

Thanks a lot for responding.

Why are you using "/Contents/Applications/"?

TBH I can't remember exactly why because I set this up ~7-8 years ago.

I think I might've used this path because the helper app declares NSServices in the Info.plist and I was unable to get the these services to appear in the Services menu until I changed the path to /Contents/Applications/

I could be remembering wrong and maybe just switching the path would resolve but is Spotlight indexing required to get the .app's NSServices to appear in the Services menu?

I could be remembering wrong and maybe just switching the path would resolve but is Spotlight indexing required to get the .app's NSServices to appear in the Services menu?

Sorry for the double reply and the re-ask, but I was still wondering about this.

I am planning on changing the Path to Contents/Helpers and testing in a virtual environment in case there is any caching etc. as it related to Services to see if it works. These helper apps need their Services to be discovered by the system and is core to their functionality so if that somehow requires Spotlight indexing or being registered with Launch services or whatever I can't change the path.

If you have any knowledge about this that could save me some time so I don't go on a wild goose chase that would be awesome. I could be misremembering all this because of the amount of time that has passed since I set all this up but I think I changed the path to "/Contents/Applications/" because I otherwise couldn't get the Services to show up.

If Services are expected to be discovered for helper apps in Contents/Helpers/ then I'll go ahead and try moving them but if you already know that that's just not going to work for my use case that would be great to know ahead of time.

Okay so I moved the path to Contents/Helpers. I tested in a Virtual Machine (though not a complete fresh one) but it seems the services for the app in Contents/Helpers are indeed discoverable.

So over the last 8 years I either misremembered my reason for choosing Contents/Applications/ or I made a mistake or this was an issue that was resolved during that time. In any case I think the complete answer is:

Use Contents/Helpers instead of Contents/Applications to get the app out of the Spotlight app launcher on Tahoe. Thanks for your help