In the System Settings > General > Login Items & Extensions - Extensions pane, when I select the By App tab, I can see multiple instances of extensions for different applications and sub-types. e.g. Books (from Apple) is listed twice with the Sharing subtype.
For the specific extension I'm checking, I can see multiple instances listed for the File Provider sub-type.
The number of instances does not seem to correspond to anything.
There are 5 instances listed and it seems like these are not exact duplicates because when I disable one using the (i) dialog, the others are still enabled.
This number (5) corresponds to nothing obvious:
- at one time, there is only 1 instance of the File Provider (a Finder Extension) installed.
- if I use the pluginkit command line tool to list the extensions, it only reports 3 known versions of this extension.
As a developer I'm puzzled by this list with duplicates. As an end user, I'm totally puzzled by this list with duplicates.
macOS Tahoe 26.5 (25F71)
[Q] What is this list in the Login Items & Extensions pane supposed to represent? Is it known to be buggy when it comes to its contents?
As an end user, I'm totally puzzled by this list with duplicates.
I think that’s the key point here. If the UI is displaying information that would confuse a typical user than that’s bugworthy regardless of whether there’s a ‘good’ underlying reason for what it’s doing.
My experience with System Settings on the Mac is that it’s just not capable of dealing with:
- The user installing multiple copies of an app
- Especially if some of those copies get deleted
I’ve dealt with extensively in the context of local network privacy, and hence this comment in TN3179:
People might see unexpected behavior in System Settings > Privacy & Security if they have multiple versions of the same app installed (FB15568200).
If you encounter similar problems in the extension space I recommend that you file your own bugs about that.
IMPORTANT I encourage you to try to replicate these problems on a clean machine. A bug that says “My current development Mac shows this set of problems.” is less like to get traction than a bug that says “I started with a clean Mac, performed these sequence of reasonable user actions, and saw this specific problem.”
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Quinn “The Eskimo!” @ Developer Technical Support @ Apple
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