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Comment by dinkblam | Hacker News Reader

off-topic rant mode on

Little Snitch is awesome, but i had to stop using it at version 5 because it can no longer be installed into a subfolder of the Applications folder.

Mac apps are supposed to be usable from any location (even outside the /Applications/ folder) and i have used hundreds of apps from /Applications/_Apps/ since the Mac OS X Public Beta in 2000 without issue.

Little Snitch >= 5.0 is the only one having problems here, despite supposedly being a "real native Mac app". what gives?

off-topic rant mode off

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I think it might be a security thing. The Mach kernel uses full file paths at the heart of the system. They may be relying on Apple maintaining the Application folder integrity. If that allowed running from other locations it becomes harder to insure the integrity of binary running.

That seems like such a bizarre restriction imposed by the app developer. They must have gone out of their way to stop this, because every application on my system can run from pretty much anywhere on my filesystem.

It's as if a Windows developer decided their program should only be runnable from a directory under "Program Files". So weird! Do they provide an explanation on their web site for the change?

Have you tried emailing the developer? As the article says, that's what I did.

I shan't be denied my right to wildly speculate.

Does it work if you put it in the subfolder then symlink into /Applications?

Anecdote: This became a problem for me with several apps after installing Sequoia

How come you’re nesting?

wanted to keep 3rd party and 1st party stuff separate.

also makes copying all installed apps to another mac a 1-second thingie

on Sequoia, it's already separated. Apps shipped as part of the OS live in /System/Applications, and stuff you install (however you do it) are in /Applications.

What’s meant to go under /Users/<username>/Applications ? If I’m the only user of the machine is there a difference between that and /Applications ?

Looks like for me the only thing is Jetbrains IDEs installed themselves there hmm.

I think for the average user it's more of a remnant of NeXTStep. It is galling that Little Snitch doesn't let you use a supported feature; but I think Apple doesn't really care about ~/Applications any more, since they "solved" it w/ the Applications and System/Applications "split".

> NeXTStep

That was 30 years ago! Why should Apple stick to a decades-long rule?

IMHO the best way to do this is to install apps in the Applications subfolder of your user directory. When you do this, Launchpad and everything else treats them as if they were installed in the /Applications folder, but it's still trivially easy to tell what you need to migrate to a new machine.

- Typically third party apps require admin passwords to update when in the applications folder which is a pain for non admin users. - Sometimes it is nice to put apps in a users applications folder so other users do not have access (do not have other users games cluttering launchpad). - Sometimes you just want to put your utilities in the utilities folder.

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