Force Stop App From Mac
- To force quit a Mac app, you can call up the Force Quit Applications menu from the Apple menu button in the upper-left corner or by hitting Command-Option-Esc. But if it's a menu bar app that's.
- Jul 04, 2018 Force Quit with Mac Shortcut To do the same thing but faster, use Mac shortcut keys to close frozen applications. On your keyboard, press and hold Command + Option + Esc. It will immediately bring up a “Force Quit Application” window.
I know that when the system is stuck or frozen then you might feel the end of the world. But with a simple force shut down and restart the system should work properly fine.
As it is a computing system this can be the major problem as sometimes it can get frozen.
In this article, we are going to talk about the major ways through which you can easily restart and reboot your Mac.
Jul 07, 2020 If any apps refuse to quit, press Option + Cmd + Escape to open the Force Quit window. Select the unresponsive app in this window, then click Force Quit to close it down. After closing every app, try to shut down your Mac normally using the Apple menu.
And by this, you can easily make sure that you don’t have a corrupted and froze Mac system.
But before we look at the force shut down or restart options in mac there are few factors that are in play when you want to restart or force shut down your Mac.
Here we are also going to discuss that as well as the ways that you can use to force shut down the Mac system.
Before you Force Shut Down your Mac
When you decide to force shut down the Mac due to any reason such as a freeze of applications, or any software complication then there are few factors that you should consider before doing this force shut down action.
Because if you do not follow these factors of considering them then your Mac could get corrupted for that.
As when you go to the Apple menu and there press the shut down button if anything ks open in the background then this action will confirm that you want to shut down the Mac.
If you press to shut down then that software that is open in the background has a high chance of getting raptured or corrupted.
So, considering these factors is important and necessary when it comes to forcefully shut down a Mac.
Save the Open Files and Documents
If you are working some heavy files then it is most likely for Mac to freeze up and if that happens then you should be ready for it.
If this is the case, you don’t want to lose any unsaved progress by forcing your Mac to shut down too soon.
Try to save each of your open files by pressing Cmd + S or selecting File > Save from the menu bar.
Force Stop App From Mac To Mac
If your Mac is frozen and you can’t save anything, take a photo of your work-in-progress on your phone so you can recreate it later.
Obviously, this isn’t ideal, but it’s better than losing your work forever.
Eject External Storage
Forcing your Mac to shut down doesn’t give it a chance to safely eject external drives.
Whether you use these drives for Time Machine backups or external storage, ejecting them unsafely might cause irreparable damage to their contents.
To eject your external storage safely, go to your Desktop and drag the external drive to the Trash icon in the Dock.
Alternatively, open Finder and click the Eject button next to your drive in the sidebar.
Quit Every App
If your Mac won’t shut down normally, it’s probably because one of your apps has frozen and refuses to quit.
You can help matters by manually closing each app yourself. There’s a chance that doing this will unfreeze your Mac so you don’t need to force it to shut down or restart after all.
Press Cmd + Q to quit your current app or click the app name in the menu bar and select Quit [App].
Cycle between your open apps using Cmd + Tab to find out which other apps are still running.
If any apps refuse to quit, press Option + Cmd + Escape to open the Force Quit window. Select the unresponsive app in this window, then click Force Quit to close it down.
After closing every app, try to shut down your Mac normally using the Apple menu.
If you still can’t do that, or if you can’t close every app—then find out how to force shut down or restart your Mac below.
How to Force Shut Down or Restart your Mac?
If your Mac is frozen and completely unresponsive, the only way to fix it is by using a force shutdown or force restart.
The methods for how to force shut down or restart your Mac are exactly the same for a MacBook Pro, MacBookAir, iMac, or any other kind of Mac.
Here are the three different ways to do it!
1- Hold the Power Button
Every Mac has a power button. On a laptop—like a MacBook Pro or MacBook Air—you usually find it at the top-right of your keyboard or Touch Bar.
It may have a power symbol or an eject symbol on it, or it may be a blank Touch ID sensor.
On an iMac, you’ll find the power button behind the bottom-left corner of the screen. If you’re looking at the back of your iMac, it’s on the bottom right.
To force shut down your Mac, press and hold the power button until the screen goes black.
This might take 10 seconds or more; just keep holding the button. After your Mac shuts down, wait a few moments to let it cool off, then briefly press the power button again to restart it.
2- Use a Keyboard Shortcut
There are two keyboard shortcuts you can use to shut down your Mac:
The first shortcut attempts to safely close apps first, while the second force your Mac to shut down without losing anything. Because of this, it’s best to try the first shortcut first.
If you want to avoid any risks regarding shutting down your Mac then press this combination of keys Control + Option + Cmd + Power.
Don’t hold down the power button or you’ll force shut down your Mac; give it a brief press with the other buttons instead.
That shortcut might not work if your Mac can’t safely close every app, in which case you need to force your Mac to shut down instead.
Press Control + Cmd + Power to do so. This time you need to hold the keys for a few seconds before your Mac shuts down.
Also Read: How to Speed up Windows 10? (Short Guide)
3- Drain the Battery
If your Mac is frozen and you think they’re not an option to make it work then the easy option is to force it to shut down using one of the two methods above. Still, there are some rare situations when they don’t work either.
If that’s the case, the next best method is to remove the power supply or drain the battery.
Again, it’s important to know that powering off your Mac this way is potentially damaging. You might lose unsaved data—or worse, you might create corrupt files on your hard drive.
You should only remove the power supply from your Mac as a last resort.
If you have a MacBook, a MacBook Air, or a MacBookPro, unplug the power cable and wait for the battery to die.
You might need to wait overnight for this to happen, depending on the health of your battery. But eventually, your Mac will power off. When it does, charge it back up and turn it on.
With older MacBooks, you can remove the battery from the bottom of the computer instead. This is a quicker way to force your MacBook to shut down.
If you have an iMac, a Mac Mini, or a Mac Pro, simply unplug the power cable from the back of the computer.
Wait a few moments to let your Mac cool down, then reconnect the power cable and power it back on.
Find Out What to do If Your Mac Won’t Turn Back on Again!
Most of the time, your frozen Mac should boot up again normally after forcing it to shut down or restart.
Any apps that weren’t working should run smoothly and you can carry on with whatever important projects you were working on.
That said, your Mac might refuse to restart if an underlying problem caused it to freeze in the first place.
Potential problems range from outdated software to faulty hard drives.
Use our step-by-step guide to find out what to do if your Mac won’t boot up; you can fix most problems yourself at home.
But if not, you may need to book a physical repair with an Apple store.
If you have a problem with an app on your Android smartphone you may have read that you should do a “Force Stop” and then “Clear Cache” to fix it. And actually, that might very well be exactly what you need to do. But why does that help? What does “Force stop” do and what is a cache? Let me explain.
Force Stop
At the heart of Android is the Linux kernel, it is the component responsible for managing memory and processes along with a whole bunch of other resources. Whenever you start an app you are actually starting a Linux process.
A process is a logical container for a program (app). It is started by the kernel and is used as a way to share the system resources (including memory and CPU time) among all the running apps. Each process has an ID, known as the PID (Process ID); a priority, how important is it; its own address space, plus related pages of physical memory; and some state information: running (or runnable), sleeping, stopped and zombied.
The kernel’s job is to schedule CPU time and allocate memory to the process so that it can run. The way it works is that the kernel gives slices of CPU time to each of the running processes. If a process is sleeping (because it is waiting for something like data from the network) then it doesn’t get any CPU time. This juggling of processes goes on at the millisecond level, very fast, and just like the frames of a cartoon, you get the appearance of smoothness and multiple programs running at once.
Finally, when an app exits, the kernel will clean up all the resources used by the app (like open files, allocated memory etc) and eventually delete the process that was created for that app.
Each app can be in one of several different states: running, paused or stopped. These are different from the process states, as defined by Linux, and represent the “Activity Lifecycle” as defined by Android. Google puts it like this, “as a user navigates through, out of, and back to your app, the Activity instances in your app transition through different states in their lifecycle.”
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The interesting thing about Android is that it never kills an app directly. Instead, it kills the process in which the activity runs, destroying not only the activity but everything else running in the process, as well. It might do this when it needs to free up RAM or a user can kill a process by using Force Stop in the Application Manager.
When everything is working smoothly, an app will transition from one activity state to another and will either eventually be killed off by Android (after moving to the stopped state) or it will just hang around in the background until the user brings it to the foreground again. However, if things start to go wrong the app can misbehave. It might stop responding to certain events, it might get stuck in some kind of loop or it might just start doing unpredictable things.
In such cases, the app might need to be killed off and then restarted. That is what Force Stop is for, it basically kills off the Linux process for the app and cleans up the mess!
The reason why using Force Stop is recommended when trying to fix a misbehaving app it is 1) it kills of the current running instance of that app and 2) it means that the app will no longer be accessing any of its cache files, which leads us to step 2: Clear Cache.
Clear Cache
After the app has been killed the next step is to delete the data in the cache directory. When an application needs a temporary file, a pre-processed file, or when it wants to keep a local copy of a file which was downloaded from the Internet then it will get placed in the app’s cache directory. Each app has its own directory where it can put working files.
The idea is as follows. If an app downloads files or data from the Internet then it would be a waste of bandwidth plus a waste of time to download the very same files every time the app starts. Instead, any files that need downloading from the Internet can be downloaded once and then stored in the cache. From time to time the app can check if those temporary copies are still valid and refresh the cache if needed.
Another example would be if the app needs to process a file, maybe perform some decoding or decryption on some data. Rather than performing this decoding or decryption every time the app launches, which would use a lot of CPU cycles, the app can do it once and then store the result in the cache. Again, the app could check the validity of the processed file and refresh the cache if needed.
The reason these are temporary files is that the app should not rely on these files being present as Android can delete them when a device runs low on storage. In these cases, the app just simply downloads the data again, or processes the files again and creates new ones in its cache.
Apps can also store files more permanently by using the app data directory. This is different to the cache directory and is designed for persistent files owned by the app. Since Android is able to delete files in the cache directory without notifying the app, it is also safe for users to delete those files via the “Clear Cache” button!
This can help fix misbehaving apps as it clears out the pool of temporary files and forces the app to recreate them and so gives the app a kind of fresh start. This can often fix the problem as the error was in the processing of a temporary or cached file.
A side benefit of clearing the cache is that it frees up storage space. So if you are running low on internal storage then clearing the cached data for all apps can help.
Wrap-up
After some experimentation during the Android P beta, Google’s latest version of Android keeps the same buttons and functionality for Force Stop and Clear Cache as previous versions. You’ll still find both under the apps setting menu.
Android P will automatically crash your non-responsive apps
Android 9.0 Pie does introduce something new though – the automatic closing of non-responsive apps. This means that you hopefully won’t have to force close apps that stop responding anymore, the system should handle everything automatically. As such, users won’t see the “app not responding” (ANR) dialog box to alert them to an unresponsive app if they’re running Pie. However, if for some reason an app does stop responding Pie users should still try the Force Stop and Clear Cache buttons to kill the app and then restart it.
- Force Stop can still be used to kill frozen apps with Android P, but this should now happen automatically.
- Clear Cache remains in place with Android 9.0, but Clear Data has been relabeled to Clear Storage.
If you need instructions on how to clear an apps’ cache then there are a number of excellent guides on Android Authority including how to clear app data and cache in Android 6.0 Marshmallow and how to regain storage space by cleaning the cache on your Android device. Using Force Stop is very similar, just follow the instructions in the linked guides, but tap on “Force Stop” rather than “Clear Cache.”
What are your experiences with Force Stop and Clear Cache? Are there any apps which you find use a lot of storage space for cached files? Please let me know in the comments below.