The Home Assistant app in macOS keeps launching itself every 1-2 hours, and I can’t find how it does that so I can stop it.
There is no process in Activity Monitor named anything related to home assistant. There is nothing in the login items. And I have used the app KnockKnock to check all the places where a process could hook itself to be restarted (launchd daemons, cron jobs, etc). I couldn’t find anything! … and yet Home Assistant keeps starting up.
I could probably just delete the app - but I want to understand how is this possible. If this happened with malware it would be a very bad situation, right?
For more context:
This is macOS 13.4 on an Apple Silicon MacbookPro.
I installed the mac app with brew, with
brew install home-assistant
… which just installed the 2023.4,2023.460 release from GitHub.
I used the app for some days and then today I restarted my mac.
I did not start the Home Assistant app, and yet it started by itself after a while - not on login.
I keep quitting it, but after 1-2 hours it just launches itself again.
FWIW, KnockKnock is looking possibly outdated, so I have also tried sfltool dumpbtm, which seems to be a more recent way to check background runnable stuff in macOS.
It still doesn’t show anything that I could trace back to Home Assistant.
I have narrowed this down to Home Assistant.app being enabled in System Settings / Privacy&Security / Focus. I guess it gets called by the OS, even when it is disabled or not present in the Login/background items pane. Looks to me like a malware problem waiting to happen.
@jchh , maybe you can check whether the app is there in your settings and disabling it stops the autostarting?
But mine doesn’t open on restart, probably because I disabled it both in the Home Assistant prefs and in the OS’s settings’ login items’ “allow in background”.
In my case, the app starts randomly, every few hours - as long as it is enabled in the Privacy/Focus permissions. That’s why I asked if that’s your case.