Fix: stuck progress bar below LaunchPad icon

stuck progress bar below LaunchPad icon

I had this issue for a while on my MacBook Air where there would constantly be a progress bar below the LaunchPad icon. Typically, this progress bar means something is downloading, but after checking, I couldn’t find anything being installed on my Mac, so I figured the problem had to be deeper than that. In this post, I will share with you a few things you can try if you are facing the same issue.

Check for paused or stalled downloads

First thing you should check is making sure you didn’t accidentally pause any download in the LaunchPad. To do so, click on the LaunchPad icon and browse through your app icons. If you see one marked as paused, then click on it to resume downloading. If this is the source of your progress bar constantly showing under the LaunchPad icon, that should fix the issue.

Another related issue might be a stalled download. To verify this, launch the Mac App Store and see if there is any update available. If so, update all your apps. If not, it might be a good idea to log out and log in again to clear any kind of cache-related issue.

Remove the LaunchPad icon from your Dock

Another potential solution would be to remove the LaunchPad icon from your Dock. To do so, just click and hold on the icon, and just drag it out of the Dock. Once you’ve done that, you can add the icon again by going to the Applications folder and drag and dropping LaunchPad back in the Dock.

Reset LaunchPad via Terminal

If none of that has worked, your final option will be to reset LaunchPad with a simple Terminal command. Open up Terminal and type or copy/paste the following command:

defaults write com.apple.dock ResetLaunchPad -bool true; killall Dock

Hopefully, one of these solutions will fix your problem. In my case, resetting LaunchPad did the trick.