Dark Pattern: Stop Spotify from Starting up on Mac

Brant Day
4 min readNov 17, 2020

I know this is a lame story to post but OMG it took me way longer to figure this out than is should have and the feature was buuuuuuried. Dark. UX. Pattern.

You’re frustrated because you’re having computer issues. Something has broken and is glitching causing you to not only look through google but to try all kinds of things that you’re pretty sure might cause your computer to explode. In your desperation you try anything because you really want to watch that last episode of “Raised by Wolves” (that show is crazy out there). In trying anything you find yourself continually rebooting, restarting, shutting down, etc your computer in hopes that upon rebirth…its risen from the ashes of frustration to birth a new “works just like it did” baby engulfed in the flames of your joy.

Each time it fails your frustration is mounting. Each new login its not fixed and to add insult to injury you keep quiting the spotify app that constantly opens up upon login. Why is it opening up? You go to your system preferences and check your user login items…no spotify.

Users and groups with the login items open….no spotify

You right click the icon in your dock and check to see if login options have been set there…

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Brant Day

Aspirations of world domination Founder, designer, and Illustrator @wattle_n_daub. Boring people to death with brand, illustration, and web design