SUMMARY
While Input is running with its normal Dock icon visible, a second matching Input icon repeatedly appears beside it and immediately disappears. The Dock expands and contracts around the transient entry. The main window remains open and usable.
The window movement in my recording is intentional: I am dragging it to demonstrate that the window works. The defect is the duplicate, flickering Dock icon, not the window movement.
ENVIRONMENT
• Input 1.0.0 (bundle identifier: it.focusense.input-app)
• macOS 27.2, build 26B5091g; arm64
• Bundled Electron 40.10.6
• Creator Micro 2; firmware 0.6.3-rc.12 reported in Input's log
• Observed 29 September 2026
OBSERVED BEHAVIOR
1. Input is already running, with the main window open and its usual icon in the Dock.
2. A second matching icon briefly appears next to it.
3. The extra icon immediately disappears and returns intermittently.
The behavior repeats within a 13.35-second recording. The extra icon is visible near the start, absent around 2 seconds, and returns around 3.5 seconds. Dragging the window is not an established trigger. A clean-start reproduction recipe and frequency across separate sessions are not yet established.
EXPECTED
One stable app representation while Input is running, without an unexplained second icon repeatedly entering and leaving the Dock.
IMPACT
Distracting Dock flicker and layout movement. It looks as though Input is repeatedly launching even though its main window remains usable. No crash or data loss observed.
INVESTIGATION — CAUSE NOT YET CONFIRMED
A later process check sampled 20 times over roughly five seconds and found one stable main Input process plus the same four Electron helpers. All installed helper bundles declare LSUIElement=true, and Input requests a single-instance lock. No second main process was observed. This sampling was not synchronized with the original recording and cannot exclude very short-lived child processes.
Read-only inspection of the installed app shows explicit app.dock.show()/hide() calls around main-window creation/destruction, tray reopen, and autostart. Electron 40.10.6 contains a workaround for rapid Dock hide/show transitions causing duplicate icons on macOS. This is an investigation lead, not proof that those transitions caused my symptom:
https://github.com/electron/electron/blob/v40.10.6/shell/browser/browser_mac.mm#L474-L530
The radial-menu and cheat-sheet windows are transparent, non-focusable macOS panels configured with skipTaskbar:false. Their lifecycle is another path to check; that setting has not been established as the cause.
RELATED REPORT / MORE SPECIFIC LEAD
I found this existing report describing similar Dock behavior on the same macOS build:
That reporter observed short-lived osascript processes launched by AppSense registering under Input's bundle identity as foreground applications. Their follow-up says a local change to read NSWorkspace.sharedWorkspace.frontmostApplication stopped those foreground registrations while polling continued. These are the other reporter's findings, not independently verified on my installation. Please consider whether my duplicate-icon symptom is the same issue and link or merge it if appropriate.
REQUESTED CHECKS
• Identify the transient Dock item's owning process and whether it is an app entry or window item.
• Correlate the icon's appearance with AppSense's window-info-retriever.scpt child processes and their activation/registration state.
• Log Dock show/hide calls and main/radial/cheat-sheet window lifecycle events.
• Compare device connected/disconnected and a diagnostic build with AppSense polling disabled.
• Check the same behavior on another macOS version.
I have a 13.35-second screen recording and still frames showing the duplicate icon present and absent, available to provide.
SUCCESS CRITERION
Input's Dock representation remains stable during normal use, window dragging, and auxiliary-panel activity, without repeated duplicate-icon insertion/removal.
