Hey Jordan,
Man, I spent half of yesterday wrestling MacAppBox into submission on my Intel iMac late-2019 with macOS Ventura 13.6.3 — you know that launcher organizer that corrals your scattered apps into tidy Dock groups and smart stacks? Perfect for when /Applications turns into a post-apocalyptic mess of trials, betas, and forgotten utils. Grabbed the latest DMG, dragged it over, double-clicked to launch... and it just choked right at startup. Dock icon would pulse for three seconds tops, Activity Monitor showed the process spiking to 120% CPU on the WindowServer thread, then poof — terminated by launchd without so much as a dialog box. No crash log, no "damaged app" warning, just silent failure every time I tried.
I started with the classic Gatekeeper dance to eliminate the low-hanging fruit. Right-click on the app, Open to trigger the "unidentified developer" override — got the macOS prompt, authenticated, watched it bounce and die identically. Headed straight to System Settings > Privacy & Security, provoked another launch attempt to surface the "Allow Anyway" option at the bottom, hit it with my password, even Spotlight-indexed the bundle for good measure. Nada. Emptied Trash fully, nuked ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.launchservicesd and ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.LaunchServices.QuarantineEventsV2 with rm -rf, snagged a fresh download. Same story — ps aux | grep MacAppBox flashed the PID briefly, then securityd or launchd smothered it. I figured maybe Ventura's SIP was clashing with the app's helper tools or some Rosetta 2 emulation hiccup since my iMac's Intel, but Console only muttered "killed: 9" without stack details. Felt like the system was cache-locking a bad signature from the first fail.
Then it dawned on me what was really going on. LaunchServices was hoarding a poisoned quarantine state from those initial flops, blocking bundle re-registration entirely, and MacAppBox packs these nested executables in Contents/Library/LoginItems that Ventura scans extra hard under hardened runtime. Not pure Gatekeeper — more a stubborn cache + partial notarization mismatch where the inner tools lacked proper stapling. Ventura 13.6 tightens this vs older releases, hitting organizer apps that mess with launchd plists especially hard.
I found this page useful poking around in my browser history — this page — it jogged my memory on Ventura's picky cache behavior with launcher bundles.
What finally cracked it was a full LaunchServices reset paired with deep quarantine scrubbing on the mounted DMG before touching Applications. Terminal was my hammer:
First, obliterate the database:
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/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user -domain all
Waited two minutes for rebuild (tail -f /var/log/system.log if you wanna watch the fireworks). Still in ~/Downloads with DMG mounted:
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xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine MacAppBox.app find MacAppBox.app/Contents -type f \( -name "*.appex" -o -name "*.dylib" -o -name "LoginItems" \) -exec xattr -d com.apple.quarantine {} \; 2>/dev/null
That cleared attributes recursively where it mattered. Copied to /Applications, right-click Open — override prompt came clean, no bounce. Locked it down with verification:
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codesign --verify --deep --verbose --strict=requirements /Applications/MacAppBox.app spctl --assess --verbose=4 /Applications/MacAppBox.app
All good: "satisfies its Designated Requirement," "accepted source of code." Apple spells it out in their unidentified apps guide — silent kills often mean cache grudges, not corruption. For devs, notarization deep dive covers stapling helpers. App Store's dry on this one (search apps.apple.com).
Now it's humming — stacked my 50-ish tools into workflow groups (dev, media, utils), auto-archives unused stuff, sips 15MB RAM idle, native Intel build so no Rosetta tax. Minor gotcha: it skipped one Launchpad symlink until I sudo launchctl unload the affected plist, but rescan sorted it.
Quick checklist for the next poor soul (or me in a month):
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lsregister -kill across all domains first.
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Deep xattr on DMG contents (LoginItems/execs).
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Post-copy: right-click Open + codesign/spctl audit.
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launchctl unload if grouping stutters.
Bro, if your Dock's a dumpster fire like mine was, this thing declutters life once you reset Ventura's memory. Total game-changer post-fix. Shoot if yours acts up too.