Idle Mac apps, and why they stay open
macOS does not quit apps you have forgotten. They sit in the Dock, hold memory, and wait. Here is what idle actually means, and how a hide-then-quit pass can stay safe.
Leaving an app open is the default
On a Mac, closing a window is not the same as quitting. Safari, Mail, Xcode, and a dozen Electron apps will sit in the Dock after you have not touched them for hours. That is convenient when you meant to come back. It is noise when you did not.
Those processes still occupy memory. Some still run timers, refresh, or keep GPU contexts around. Apple Silicon handles this better than older hardware did, but a Dock full of yesterday's work is still yesterday's work. The system will not tidy it for you.
Idle is not the same as unused on purpose
A render in Premiere, a download in a browser, or a Logic session you stepped away from is not something you want closed. A Slack window you have not looked at since morning might be. Any tool that quits on idle has to tell those cases apart, or people will turn it off after one scare.
Amhara treats auto-close as opt-in. It is off until you turn it on. When it is on, an idle app is hidden first, then quit after a delay you choose. You can whitelist anything, snooze a single app, or set a per-app idle threshold. Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, and Finder are never closed. A second tier, including Figma and Photoshop, gets a warning first. Known editors are checked for unsaved documents before anything is quit.
This is not a cleaner
Quitting an idle app is not the same as deleting caches, “optimizing” RAM, or scanning for malware. Those products occupy a different search result, and a different kind of trust. Amhara watches which apps have been sitting there, and only acts if you asked it to. The data stays on your Mac.