Stop Dock icons bouncing when apps launch

Open one app and a single icon hops. Open the six apps you start the day with and the whole Dock erupts — a row of icons all bouncing at once. If that opening scramble is more chaos than feedback, one Terminal command turns the launch bounce off for every app at the same time.

The problem: a wall of bounces

The launch bounce is fine for a single app, but it doesn't scale. Fire up your morning set — mail, calendar, browser, chat, notes, editor — and each icon bounces independently until its app is ready. Because apps load at different speeds, you get a staggered, jittery row of movement across the Dock that lasts several seconds. It's busy, it's noisy, and it tells you nothing you didn't already know: the apps are opening.

This gets worse the more apps you open together — right when you want the Dock to feel settled and ready, it's at its most frantic.

One command, every app

There's no toggle for this in System Settings, so use Terminal. It's a global setting — it covers every app's launch bounce at once, not one app at a time. Open Terminal (Applications → Utilities, or via Spotlight) and run:

# Stop every icon bouncing on launch
defaults write com.apple.dock launchanim -bool false
killall Dock

killall Dock reloads the Dock so the change is live immediately. Now open your whole morning set at once — the icons appear, light up their running indicators, and settle, with no bouncing. To bring the animation back later:

# Restore the default launch bounce
defaults write com.apple.dock launchanim -bool true
killall Dock

It behaves the same on macOS 13 Ventura, 14 Sonoma, and 15 Sequoia, and the setting persists across restarts.

It calms down login, too

The biggest wall of bounces usually happens right after you log in, when your login items all launch together. If you have several apps set to open at startup, every one of them would normally bounce its way onto the Dock — turning the tweak off makes that first minute noticeably calmer. It's a good moment to also review which apps actually need to auto-start: how to manage startup items on Mac shows where to add or remove login items so only what you need comes up with the Mac.

Dial in the rest of the Dock

With the bounce gone, it's worth setting the Dock the way you actually want it. The best Dock settings on Mac covers size, hiding, magnification, and which indicators to keep, so the Dock stays calm no matter how many apps you throw at it.