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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-10T21:26:01+00:00

I have a launcher application in a bundle in /Applications that chooses a binary

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I have a launcher application in a bundle in /Applications that chooses a binary and fork/execs it. What I would like is for them to share a dock tile. I have tried a few approaches and none of them are satisfactory.

1. Keep the binary bundled with the app

If the binary is contained within the app bundle, this seems to work. However, it’s generally considered bad practice for a bundle to modify itself, and I can’t guarantee that a user has write access to /Applications. I tried putting a symlink to e.g. ~/Library/Application Support/MyBinaries/mybinary but this gives a separate dock tile.

2. Keep the binary outside the app bundle

If the binary is outside the app bundle, I get a separate dock tile. Why don’t I set one of the processes to be an agent s.t. one of the tiles does not appear? This would have to be the launcher as the user should not be able to skip the launcher’s logic as to which binary to run. Unfortunately this means that quit doesn’t work properly, and you can’t click the dock to restore the binary’s window. It may be possible to get this to work by passing messages between the applications properly.

3. Massively hacky solution

There’s a rather hacky way of doing this by adding an extra level of indirection, where the app at /Applications/MyLauncher.app launches another app in ~/Library/Application Support/Launcher2.app, which contains the binaries in its bundle. Only the second launcher has a dock icon.

This seems rather hacky, so I thought I would open this up to SO to see if anyone has a better solution?

EDIT

In option 2, I was keeping the binaries in bundles of their own. Don’t do this. When I kept them in a regular folder everything worked correctly.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Answering my own question.

    If you find yourself in this situation, go with option 2. Put the application at /Applications/MyApplication.app and keep the binaries in a folder named something like ~/Library/Application Support/MyApplication/Binaries/ and happily fork/exec them. Definitely do not put them in app bundles, as this was the source of my confusion. This solved all of my criteria:

    • Don’t need root access to modify the binaries
    • Launcher and binaries share one dock tile
    • Pressing quit on the dock tile quits the binary.
    • App appears in Launchpad
    • Launching via Dock goes through the launcher app
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