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Comment by dpkonofa | Hacker News Reader

This sounds like a series of coincidences more than anything. Spotlight has to index your drive at intervals so, if you recently added an app, it's possible that the app hadn't been indexed yet by Spotlight. Then, by the time you had done the upgrade to paid, Spotlight had indexed the file and and then it started working. There's nothing nefarious going on there. It just sounds like a coincidence.

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I can speak to this too. Latest version of MacOS. I installed Spotify weeks ago, and Spotlight just never indexed it (it's in the /Applications folder). I use Spotlight to launch every app... except Spotify, which it can't find.

What fixes it for me is reindexing via going into Spotlight preferences and adding /Applications to the list of folders not to index, then removing it.

I don't know what the priors are, but Spotlight having missed the app for a 30 full days, and then suddenly finding it after the full registration, sounds very unlikely to me.

However, I do believe it's just an unfortunate bug, nothing more sinister there. Still would be nice to know: why?

A bug kept it from indexing the app when you first installed it. Forcing a re-index of /Applications would have fixed it, likewise duplicating the app and deleting the original.

When you registered the app I assume it modified itself, triggering a re-index.

You'd think that installing a new app would add it to the index right away.

If more non-store Mac apps had an "Install" process, you would.

But you're just dragging a special type of folder off a disk image, so nah.

This was a weird coincidence or bug, nothing more. I've used free and trial versions of IntelliJ on Macs countless times without search ever having issues with them. It's hard to imagine how you'd even make the system work in that way, as an app developer.

And it does. Copying any app bundle to an indexed disk, like your boot drive, will cause it to get indexed immediately.

There are the occasional bugs though, and there’s also aggressive caching.

Spotlight indexes continually, it doesn't run at intervals. (it uses fsevents to subscribe to changes to the disk and processes those as they come in)

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