Unknown app appearing in dock?

[joptimus]

Hi,

since about a week or so once or twice a day one or two app icons appear briefly on the right side of my dock and quickly disappear. They only are visible for half a second. I have never seen this before and would like to know what app/process that is. Is this a known issue? How can I find out what it is?

I'm on the latest MacOS 12.2.

 

[allan.nyholm]

Such icons could be those of a Background Helper for an app. It could also be an application that has options to show a menubar icon and also a Dock icon where hiding the Dock icon in favor of showing the menu bar information is preferable.
If you haven't changed a thing recently in terms on applications showing only their menu bar counterpart - then you can try using something called TrashMe3 to gaze at the startup items on your system.

Usually with more modern macOS the Users & Login preferences are ditched in favor of LaunchAgents and LaunchDaemons that aren't presented to the user in an easy-to-view manner like the old Login items.

TrashMe3 and CleanMyMacX, and probably quite a few other apps that I don't have the name of, displays these Startup Items so that you may disable them should there be a listing of an completely unknown service.

TrashMe3 provides a trial if all you want is use it for looking and disabling items of these startup items.

Google Chrome and Microsoft tends to use this approach with filling up the system with Launch Daemons for background updating of their services. So that you'll always have Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome updated despite you not checking for updates like you would in the old days of applications of using Mac OS X

 

[joptimus]

This morning it stayed long enough to mouse over: It's XProtect. But still weird, since that never happened before.

 

[bogdanw]

This morning it stayed long enough to mouse over: It's XProtect. But still weird, since that never happened before.

What do you mean XProtect? As far as I know, there is no XProtect app. Only XProtect.bundle in /Library/Apple/System/Library/CoreServices/

 

[bhagemann]

Seeing same here. nothing new installed except I updated to the 12.3b3 public beta. now when I reboot, on right of dock, 2 diff icons appear, bounce once and disappear. I assume its either an apple service like the XProtect or a change in the OS making a menu extension (3rd party app, I have several) appear briefly where before they were not seen in dock.

 

[joptimus]

What do you mean XProtect? As far as I know, there is no XProtect app. Only XProtect.bundle in /Library/Apple/System/Library/CoreServices/

Hm, so I'm back to square one?

Seeing same here. nothing new installed except I updated to the 12.3b3 public beta. now when I reboot, on right of dock, 2 diff icons appear, bounce once and disappear. I assume its either an apple service like the XProtect or a change in the OS making a menu extension (3rd party app, I have several) appear briefly where before they were not seen in dock.

So at least I'm not imagining things

 

[adamlbiscuit]

AFAIK XProtect is the Mac's built-in malware prevention tool, but as stated it doesn't appear as an app so it's strange it would show up in the Dock.

 

[elptdbi3lYI]

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1492787489701982208