macOS app icon stuck on my screen

Question

I just tried to open Spotify's Mac app through the OS X LaunchPad, and when I clicked on the icon, the Mac app icon remains stuck on my screen.

I've attached some screenshots to show you. I don't know how to get it down. No matter what I do to the screen, the icon is always stuck "on top" of it.

How do I make this go away? If you're curious, Spotify opened on the second attempt. The first attempt it just got stuck.

Answer 1

Turns out, I just had to reset the 'dock' process. I opened Terminal and typed

killall Dock

and pressed enter. The screen flashed for a second, and everything came back with my stuck icon gone.

If that fails, the issue may be with Finder (this is the case with the similar issue of Stacks categories "burned in" to your desktop background). Running

killall Finder

will address that.

Answer 2

The easiest fix is to just open the app drawer, holding any icon until the move motion occurs, then move any application; it seems to fix it everytime it happens for me.

Answer 3

What I do is pressing CTRL+OPTION+ESC then relaunch Finder app. Works for me.

Answer 4

Same thing!!

Very simple solution: Just search look for the original icon in the launch pad and drag it!

Apparently this is a drag action that never completed.

Answer 5

The same thing happened to me with Firefox recently. The way I got the icon to go away was to delete all desktop spaces except one. Hope it works for you.

Answer 6

I had a similar problem with an app that won't to go away and was in the top of every window.

I installed htop (brew install htop) and searched for a part of the app name (F3), which brings me another app inside the app's folder.

Just pressed F9 and killed it. (Press q to quit htop)

The executable was not listed on Activity monitor, so htop helped me to find and kill it.

Answer 7

Working solution for me:

start the application that stuck to screen in launchscreen.