Are you greeted with a bunch of constant “Background Items Added”notifications every time you boot up your Mac or open the Login Items section in System Preferences?
- What’s happening? Some users have complained about being bombarded with “Background Items Added”notifications after logging into their Mac.
- Why care? This is very annoying. There are too many notifications to close manually and they reappear every time you open login items in system settings.
- What to do? Be (very) patient until a fix appears. If you are an advanced user who knows a thing or two about computers, consider the workaround described in this article.
macOS Ventura users are inundated with constant “Background Items Added” notifications.
If you have Apple’s macOS Ventura program installed on your Mac and you’re seeing a bunch of “Background Items Added”notifications on a daily basis, you’re definitely not alone!
According to posts on Reddit and the Apple support communities, the problem with these notifications is that they persist rather than disappear on their own. You have to reject each one manually, which gets old quickly. You can imagine the frustration of seeing about a dozen of these annoying warnings every day.
The annoying notification appears for many, if not all, startup apps that are listed in System Preferences → General → Login Items. An alert informs the user that a particular application or process has added items that may be running in the background.
What do we know so far
Both apps you have set as login items and third party processes running in the background have been confirmed to cause an annoying notification. Many apps that people download on their Mac set their own background processes and no single app is the culprit. The notification appears even for disabled background processes.
If you turn off notification previews via System Preferences → Notifications → Show Previews, notifications will still be shown but labeled as Login Items.
You will see “Background Items Added”alerts when:
- Start your Mac
- Restart your Mac
- Switching between user accounts
- Access to the “Login Items”section in the system settings.
We have been able to trace complaints of this issue back to early beta releases of macOS Ventura. Clearly, this frustrating bug has been around for a while – we hope that increased awareness of it may encourage Apple to finally fix it.
iDB can also confirm that the “Background Items Added”bug is present in the latest macOS Ventura 13.2.1 update released February 13, 2023.
What are these background processes for?
Some people have reported that deleting the launch agents or property list (.plist) files associated with the applications mentioned in these notices resolves the issue. This is a drastic solution that we do not recommend as background processes often provide functionality such as checking for updates or supporting third party hardware.
For example, Google Updater installs a background process tasked with checking for updates for any Google products you use, such as the Chrome browser. Similarly, Fantastical installs a background process that ensures instant data sync between Fantastical on your Mac and other devices.
How to Fix “Background Elements Added”Warnings
Indeed, some third-party background processes are not critical – disabling them or permanently deleting them will not break anything. However, others may be required for the application to function properly. Therefore, it is much better to wait for Apple to fix this problem than to use a workaround that requires you to delete the file.
Advanced users who do not need these guidelines can delete the. plist files in the ~/Library/LaunchAgents folder. If it doesn’t, also remove the launch daemons in ~/Library/LaunchDaemons associated with the application or developer name that are causing “Background Items Added”notifications.