Input’s Dock icon repeatedly bounces while the application remains running

Input’s Dock icon repeatedly bounces while the application remains running

I’m seeing repeated bouncing of the Input icon in the macOS Dock. Visually, it looks like the app or a background component is constantly restarting. Process inspection, however, shows that the main application stays running.

Environment:

• Input: 1.0.0-rc.7

• macOS beta: 27.2, build 26B5091g

• Device: Creator Micro 2

• Firmware: 0.6.3-rc.16

• Bundled Electron: 40.10.6

Observed behavior:

• The main Input process and its four Electron helper processes had been running continuously for over 17 minutes.

• During a 25-second observation sampled approximately every 200 ms, their process IDs remained unchanged.

• In that same period, 19 separate short-lived osascript processes were observed as children of Input, approximately one every 1.3 seconds.

• These processes execute:
  /Applications/input.app/Contents/Resources/scripts/window-info-retriever.scpt

Inspection of the installed application’s JavaScript shows that the AppSense/focused-app service repeatedly calls this script to identify the active application. After each call completes, it schedules the next call with a 1,000 ms delay. This appears to be intentional polling, rather than a crash/restart loop.

The potentially relevant finding is how macOS registers these short-lived processes. Launch Services logs show each osascript process checking in under Input’s bundle identifier, it.focusense.input-app. RunningBoard then assigns it a foreground application assertion.

For example:

launchservicesd: CHECKIN:0x0-0x6c56c5 7738 it.focusense.input-app runningboardd: Acquiring assertion targeting [anon<osascript>(501):7738] "foregroundApp:7738" runningboardd: [anon<osascript>(501):7738] Set darwin role to: UserInteractiveNonFocal

That process exits shortly afterward, and the sequence repeats with another PID.

My working hypothesis is that these repeated foreground registrations under Input’s identity trigger the Dock animation, making normal AppSense polling look like repeated application launches.

The process lifecycle and registrations are confirmed by local observation. The connection to the visible Dock animation is a strong hypothesis, but it has not yet been confirmed through an A/B test with the polling disabled. I also cannot establish whether this is a regression specific to the macOS beta.

Expected behavior:
AppSense should detect the active application without repeatedly animating Input’s Dock icon or registering each short-lived helper as a foreground application.

Could you investigate how the AppSense AppleScript process receives its application identity and foreground status on this macOS build? A background-only helper or a persistent native mechanism for observing active-application changes may avoid this behavior.