Make apps feel like they open instantly on Mac

Your Mac already opens apps fast — but the Dock's launch bounce hides it. That little hop plays for the whole time an app is loading, so your eye is stuck watching an animation instead of the window appearing. Turn the bounce off and launches feel immediate: click, and the window is just there.

Why the bounce feels like lag

Perceived speed and actual speed aren't the same thing. The launch bounce is tied to how long an app takes to open — it keeps hopping until the app is ready. That's useful feedback in theory, but in practice it does two things that make your Mac feel slower than it is:

• It draws your attention to the waiting rather than the result. A bouncing icon reads as "still loading," even for an app that opens in a blink.
• It adds a beat of animation your brain has to sit through before the window feels "arrived."

Remove it and the same launch reads as instant, because nothing stands between the click and the window. It's one of the cheapest ways to make an everyday interaction feel snappier without touching a single hardware setting.

Switch off the launch animation

There's no toggle for this in System Settings, so it's a quick Terminal command. Open Terminal (Applications → Utilities, or via Spotlight) and run:

# Make launches instant — no bounce
defaults write com.apple.dock launchanim -bool false
killall Dock

killall Dock reloads the Dock so it takes effect at once. Try opening a few apps: the icons no longer bounce, and the running-indicator dot appears the moment each app is live. Want the animation back? Reverse it:

# Bring the bounce back
defaults write com.apple.dock launchanim -bool true
killall Dock

The behavior is identical on macOS 13 Ventura, 14 Sonoma, and 15 Sequoia, and the setting persists across restarts.

Make the rest of the Dock feel instant too

Once the bounce is gone, the next things that add perceived delay are the Dock's own timings. If you hide the Dock, the pause before it slides into view and the speed of that slide are both adjustable — how to speed up the Dock on Mac walks through the delay and animation-time tweaks, and make the Dock hide and show instantly covers removing the pause entirely. Stacked together, the Dock stops feeling like something you wait on and starts feeling like it reacts to you.

If apps genuinely take a long time to launch — not just feel slow — that's a different problem. Heavy startup items, low free disk space, and Spotlight re-indexing can all drag out real launch times, and no animation tweak will fix those.

A snappier Dock, start to finish

If you're tuning for speed, it's worth setting the whole Dock at once. The best Dock settings on Mac pulls together the size, hiding, magnification, and animation choices that make the Dock feel fast rather than fussy.