{"id":51013,"date":"2026-02-18T17:17:56","date_gmt":"2026-02-18T22:17:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=51013"},"modified":"2026-05-05T14:19:04","modified_gmt":"2026-05-05T18:19:04","slug":"searching-for-apps-with-spotlight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2026\/02\/18\/searching-for-apps-with-spotlight\/","title":{"rendered":"Searching for Apps With Spotlight"},"content":{"rendered":"

Brent Simmons<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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Spotlight has recently become terrible for launching apps after being so good for years. Now when I type something like Cal or Calendar or even Calendar.app I have to manually select the actual app in the list, if it even appears.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

I’ve never used Spotlight for this on macOS (preferring LaunchBar) but have used it often with iOS. These days, I find that searching for an iOS app with Spotlight often doesn’t show the app anywhere<\/em> in the results. Sometimes it will give me a Wikipedia or App Store entry even though the app is already installed on my phone. Searching with App Library does work reliably.<\/p>\n\n

Update (2026-02-19<\/a>): Alex<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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Spotlight on my #macos #Tahoe keeps crashing because it encounters some issue inside its index.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

See also: anul agarwal<\/a> (via \nMr. Macintosh<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n

Update (2026-02-20<\/a>): TanglyConstant9<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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spotlight is meant to be GOOD not randomly decide its going to search the dictionary definition of the app im tryna open. this is crazy but i lowkey miss launchpad<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Update (2026-03-30<\/a>): Katherine Bertelsen<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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What really frustrates me about this is sometimes Spotlight will just…break. For no discernable reason. On my personal laptop, Friday it could find and run apps by name no problem. Yesterday, it couldn’t. No reboots, no changes, no real anything. Just overnight it seemed to forget apps exist!<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Update (2026-04-27<\/a>): Jason Snell<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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My friend Dr. Drang gave Spotlight in Tahoe a go<\/a> recently and had a much worse experience, most notably reporting that it was terribly slow. He quickly retreated to LaunchBar (and, for clipboard history, Keyboard Maestro).<\/p>\n

I have to agree with Dr. Drang here: I don’t know when, and I don’t know why, but over the last few months, as macOS Tahoe has gone from 26.3 to 26.4 to 26.5 beta, Spotlight has gotten progressively worse. It’s sometimes incredibly slow, making me wait to launch an app. Sometimes it misses entire categories of items. (I frequently launch items saved in my Safari favorites, and on several occasions, Spotlight just refused to show any of them.)<\/p>\n

Also, my months of using Spotlight revealed another weakness: It’s just not as good as LaunchBar is at intuiting which items are more important to me.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Update (2026-04-29<\/a>): Craig Hockenberry<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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I have a serious issue on my iPhone: the Spotlight index is corrupted and I can no longer search for apps, email, notes, or messages. It’s bad.<\/p>\n

Of course I’ve looked for clues on how to fix it but none of these work:<\/p>\n