A new dot under your Dock icons, and a folder you don't remember: what changed in macOS 27

Two small, unrelated changes in macOS 27 Golden Gate have been generating very similar reactions: a quiet "wait, what is this?" moment right after updating. One is a new visual detail under your Dock icons. The other is a folder that appears somewhere on the Mac with no obvious origin. Neither is a bug, but neither is well explained anywhere in Apple's own release notes either, so here is what each one is.

The new dot under Dock icons

If you have noticed a small, light gray dot sitting under an app's icon in the Dock, even for an app you thought you already quit, this is a new Golden Gate feature, not a glitch. It indicates that the app is still technically running in the background after its windows have closed, something that has always been possible on macOS but was previously invisible unless you went looking in Activity Monitor.

This matters more than it sounds. Plenty of Mac apps, particularly ones with a menu bar presence, helper processes, or background sync behavior, do not fully quit when you close their last window or even choose Quit from the menu. They keep a process alive in the background. Until now, the only way to notice was battery drain, fan noise, or checking Activity Monitor by hand.

How to use it

1. Look at the Dock. A light gray dot under an icon means that app has at least one process still running, even though no windows are open.
2. Right-click the icon. A new option, Stop Running in Background, appears for apps in this state.
3. Click it to actually terminate the background process, rather than force-quitting the whole app through Activity Monitor.

This is a genuinely useful diagnostic if you are chasing unexplained battery drain or fan noise and want to know, at a glance, which apps are quietly still alive rather than digging through Activity Monitor's process list by hand.

How this differs from the classic running indicator

macOS has shown a small indicator under Dock icons for actively running apps for a very long time, a solid dot or small glowing mark depending on the macOS version and appearance settings. Several people spotted the Golden Gate change and assumed Apple had just reintroduced that existing feature. It has not: the two indicators mean different things and can appear independently of each other.

If an app in your Dock shows the gray dot often, that is worth noting. It is a reasonable sign to check whether a newer version is available, since well-behaved apps generally exit fully when you quit them.

The folder you do not remember creating

Separately, a number of people have found an unfamiliar folder on their Mac shortly after updating to Golden Gate and asked what it is. There is no single answer, because this symptom has several distinct, well-documented causes depending on what you actually have installed, and the folder's name and location are the biggest clues to which one applies to you.

The most common explanations, roughly in order of likelihood after a major macOS upgrade:

• A cloud-sync folder pointing at a stale location. OneDrive in particular is known to create a new sync folder with a timestamp in its name, such as OneDrive (2026-09-13 05:36:04 +0000), after a macOS upgrade, while showing an error that it cannot find the old one. This happens because cloud-storage apps on recent macOS versions use Apple's File Provider framework, and a major OS update can disrupt that framework's record of where a sync folder actually lives.
• A Relocated Items-style folder, named Relocated Items and found under /Users/Shared/. macOS creates this during a major upgrade to hold files and folders it found somewhere unexpected, most often directly on the startup disk outside your home folder, and was not sure how to handle. This is an established macOS behavior going back to Catalina, and it can reappear on any subsequent major upgrade if you still have non-standard folders sitting at the top level of your drive.
• A leftover installer or update payload. Large, cryptically named folders under ~/Library/Updates or /Library/Updates can be left behind after an update completes, particularly if you ran a Golden Gate beta at any point before the public release.
• A third-party app's own folder. Several cloud and creative apps have, in the past, created unexpected folders during an update, sometimes due to a bug in their own installer rather than anything macOS did.

How to identify what yours actually is

1. Read the exact name and location first. A name containing a timestamp, inside your home folder, points to a cloud-sync app. A folder literally named Relocated Items under /Users/Shared is the macOS upgrade mechanism. Something inside ~/Library/Updates is leftover installer data.
2. Check the folder's contents before assuming anything. Relocated Items folders typically include a PDF explaining what was moved and why.
3. If it is empty, and appeared right after an update, it is most likely a leftover from the upgrade process itself, and safe to investigate further rather than panic over.
4. If you use a cloud-sync service such as OneDrive, iCloud Drive, Dropbox, or Google Drive, check that service's own sync status and settings before touching the folder. A sync app pointing at the wrong location can be fixed inside that app, and deleting the folder yourself can make reconnecting it harder, not easier.

What not to do with an unidentified folder

• Do not delete a Relocated Items folder without opening it first. It can contain real, non-duplicated data that macOS moved out of the way rather than deleted.
• Do not delete a timestamped cloud-sync folder before confirming, inside that app's own settings, which location it currently considers the active one. The folder that looks older is not always the one safe to remove.
• Do not assume it is malware based on an unfamiliar name alone. If you want to rule that out properly, see our guide to checking a Mac for malware, which covers where real infections actually hide, which is almost never a plainly visible folder with a readable name.

A few more questions

Does Stop Running in Background fully quit the app? It ends the background process that was keeping the app alive after its windows closed. If you reopen the app afterward, it starts fresh, the same as launching it after a normal quit.

Will the gray dot show up on every app? No. It only appears for an app that macOS has detected is still running something in the background after you closed its windows or chose Quit. Many apps quit cleanly and never show it.

Is it safe to use Stop Running in Background on anything I see it on? Generally yes, since it is meant as user-facing cleanup. The one exception is an app you know deliberately runs a background helper on purpose, such as a sync client or a menu bar utility, where stopping it also stops the feature you wanted.

The short version

• A light gray dot under a Dock icon in macOS 27 means that app is still running in the background after its windows closed. Right-click and choose Stop Running in Background to end it.
• This is separate from the classic running-app Dock indicator, which has existed for years and means something different.
• An unfamiliar folder after updating is most often a stale cloud-sync reference, a Relocated Items folder, or leftover installer data, not a new macOS feature with a single explanation.
• Check the folder's name, location, and contents before deleting anything.