Suggestion: How to know who launched an app?

General
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I’ve just started using App Control and its a useful app! I like the simple UI and works well!

While using I found that its letting me know all these apps are launching one after another! and its good to see what all is using resources - Sometimes I find it hard as to why this app was launched or who launched it?

  • Which parent process initiated the launch

  • Whether it was user-initiated, system-triggered, or invoked by another application

  • The chain of execution (i.e., process hierarchy)

  • Any contextual reason or event that caused the launch

Without this, it feels like I’m only getting half the picture. In many cases, it’s difficult to determine why something started running. I can sometimes make an educated guess based on timing or related activity, but that’s not reliable enough.

I think this would be great feature to have!

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Thanks for your feedback on making launch data more accessible and understandable. @bradar93

Currently if you go to our “activity” screen, then choose an app by clicking its icon, then scroll down to the bottom of the drawer, you can then see the processes launched by the app. We should improve how to see what process launched that app though, as you suggest.

We have even considered adding an optional alert based on this, but perhaps this activity happens so often it could be annoying?

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Ahh I did not know that! Ok that makes snse for it to be there. But I think as a user I went the other way around. Ohh an app launched - hmm who launched this? I think yeah it might be annoying - but you could than whitelist apps - like yes I know this app launches these things its fine - I want to monitor if there’s new suspicious activity. With coding agents and cli tools - they launch all sorts of apps - would be nice to know who did it :laughing:

Maybe to begin with there could be atleast an alert that people can add if they want to :person_shrugging:

Also this is not that useful when it only shows me what are essentialy Process Ids I assume?

Screenshot 2026-04-24 120001
Screenshot 2026-04-24 120001462×869 9.35 KB

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Thanks for your feedback. Yes, I agree it’s more useful to see who launched an app instead of what apps it launched, and yes those are process IDs.

We’ll keep working to improve this. The main issue we are running into is how to show this all properly in an understandable way.

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