How to Keep an App in the Dock Permanently on Mac

The Mac Dock holds two kinds of icons: apps you have pinned, which never move, and apps that are merely running, which disappear the moment you quit them. If an app you use every day keeps vanishing, it was never pinned. Pinning takes about three seconds, and there are two ways to do it.

Pin a running app with Keep in Dock

If the app is already open, its icon is sitting in the Dock right now — you just need to tell macOS to keep it there.

1. Right-click (or Control-click) the app's icon in the Dock.
2. Hover over Options in the menu that appears.
3. Click Keep in Dock. A checkmark appears next to it.

That's it. Quit the app and the icon stays put; click it any time to relaunch. To undo, open the same menu and click Keep in Dock again to clear the checkmark, or choose Options → Remove from Dock.

Drag an app in from the Applications folder

You don't have to launch an app to pin it. You can drag it straight into the Dock from Finder:

1. Open a Finder window and press Cmd+Shift+A to jump to the Applications folder.
2. Drag the app's icon down to the Dock, anywhere on the left side of the divider line (apps live on the left; files, folders, and the Trash live on the right).
3. The existing icons slide apart to make room. Drop the app where you want it.

Dragging into the Dock doesn't move the app — the Dock only stores a pointer to it. The original stays in /Applications. That's also why the icon turns into a question mark if you later delete or move the app itself.

Why some icons vanish when you quit

Two things cause the disappearing act. First, any unpinned app shows a temporary icon only while it runs — that's normal, and pinning fixes it. Second, macOS reserves a small section between the two divider lines for suggested and recent apps. Icons there shuffle constantly based on what you opened last, which makes the Dock feel unstable. If that bothers you, turn the section off:

1. Open System Settings → Desktop & Dock.
2. Turn off Show suggested and recent apps in Dock.

The same switch exists in Terminal if you prefer:

# hide the suggested/recent apps section
defaults write com.apple.dock show-recents -bool false
killall Dock

# undo: bring the section back
defaults write com.apple.dock show-recents -bool true
killall Dock

With recents off and your daily apps pinned, every icon in your Dock is one you chose, in the order you chose. You can drag pinned icons left or right at any time to rearrange them — the layout survives restarts and macOS updates.

Pinned the wrong thing?

Removing an icon is just as quick as adding one: drag it out of the Dock until Remove appears, or use the right-click menu. The full details — including why some icons seem to come back on their own — are in our guide to removing apps from the Dock.