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Lollomen's avatar
Lollomen
Copper Contributor
May 07, 2026

How to force quite an app on mac when frozen

Hi all, One of the apps on a Mac completely froze and won’t respond at all. Clicking the close button does nothing, and the spinning beach ball just keeps showing up. Looking for the safest and eas...
device management
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Jadeookb's avatar
Jadeookb
Iron Contributor
May 07, 2026

Sometimes the app becomes deeply stuck and ignores the first force quit attempt. This is a very common issue on Mac, especially the os version is pretty old and RAM is less than 4GB.

You can try the steps to force quit an frozen app on Mac:

  1. Wait 10–20 seconds.
  2. Repeat the same steps again.
  3. Restart the Mac if necessary.

 

If this happens often with the same app:

  1. Update the app
  2. Update macOS
  3. Check available storage and memory
  4. Remove problematic plugins or extensions

 

Frequent freezing can also happen when the Mac runs low on RAM or disk space. You have to uninstall unused apps and delete junk files on Mac.