Apps reopening after quitting

NateS97 wrote:

Hi all -- I'm used to using ⌘Q to quit apps, but for the past few months this has given me trouble. It started with Apple Music and Spotify, which would immediately reopen after hitting ⌘Q. Sometimes a second attempt would fix it, sometimes I'd have to force-quit bc they'd never stop reopening. Because they were both music apps, I thought it was due to a third-party music-tracking app I use, but lately it's been happening with Preview and Safari as well. Luckily the only one nowadays that gets stuck in a loop of reopening after quitting is Music.

And here's the kicker: if I right-click on the app icon and select "Quit," it quits without a problem. The only thing I can think of is that it has something to do with being in fullscreen, as I typically use my apps in fullscreen, but I have never had this issue with Firefox or any apps other than the ones listed.

Has anyone else had this problem? Any solutions? This has been going on for months across various OS updates. Thanks in advance!

SafeBoot How to use safe mode on your Mac - Apple Support will sort many anomalies

login and test, reboot as normal and test

Here's some food for thought: hnless you're using a true VPN tunnel, such as between you and your employer, school or bank's servers, they are useless from a privacy standpoint.  Read these two articles: Public VPN's are anything but private and Former Malware Distributor Kape Technologies Now Owns ExpressVPN, CyberGhost, Private Internet Access, Zenmate, and a Collection of VPN “Review” Websites. 

Also, you have two apps that are crashing frequently: MEGAsync and Zotero. If you haven't found the cause I'd fully uninstall both according to the developer's instructions and run for a bit to see if the problem is gone. Then add them back one at a time.

The problem not occurring in Safe Mode, and then reocurring after you started normally points to

some third party software modification as the cause.

In order for us to try and figure out what it may be: Please run Etrecheck and post its full report here. Use the "additional text" button and paste the report into the text box.

The first thing of note is this:

Low disk space - This computer is running critically low on free hard drive space.

This is probably not the cause of the present problem, but is hurting performance and could well soon cause crashes.

It is recommended to always have at least 15-20% free, especially on the system drive.

Do seriously consider clearing some space soon.

To that effect:

You have a lot of system extensions that are rather old.

You also apparently migrated everything from previous macs, going at least as far back as 2015.

I wonder how many of these old daemons, agents and extensions you actually need; but they are all there, and any of them may be causing problems in a much newer OS in a completely different architecture.

It is recommended, when upgrading - especially to a new mac like the M1 - to only migrate the user accounts, and start with a fresh install. Old drivers built to the 10.8 SDK are likely to not work well (and you are not likely to have a use for them, anyway).

It is like moving to a new house and bringing along all the stuff you have lying around but never used in years...

Now back to the subject at hand... I wonder if you have programmed some shortcuts into BetterTouchTool that are causing the issue... try quitting it. Does the problem continue? If not, check all the settings. There may be something there.