Mystery Solved: Why Third-Party Apps Vanished From the Mac’s Control Center

Just look at all those great third-party controls.

As I explained in my macOS Tahoe review, one of the biggest disappointments was how few third-party Control Center controls I had access to at launch. That was surprising to me given how many developers support Control Center on the iPhone and iPad.

So, I spent a lot of time investigating the issue without reaching a satisfactory answer until yesterday. The short story is it’s a bug, and there’s a workaround until it can be fixed by Apple, but here’s the rest of the back-story that didn’t make it into my macOS Tahoe review and how to sidestep it.

Before the public beta of Tahoe was ever released, I saw controls for Sequel and MusicHarbor in Control Center. That set my expectations that over the course of the summer I’d see more.

During the Tahoe betas it was slim pickings when it came to third-party controls.

Instead, those controls disappeared with the release of the Tahoe public beta. It’s not unheard of for Apple to pull a feature in advance of a public beta that needs more work, so I made a mental note to check in periodically to see if third-party controls had reappeared.

September rolled around and third-party controls were still nowhere to be seen. I started asking around, checking in with other reviewers and developers. It was around this time that I finally saw Drafts controls appear, and then several days later, ScreenFloat. I also heard from some of the developers I’d contacted that they were struggling with implementing controls. It looked to me as though few developers were supporting controls and of those that wanted to, at least some were struggling with their implementation.

The key to unlocking Control Center is Widgets. Of course?

Then yesterday I heard privately from a developer who’d been keeping in touch as they tried to implement controls. They told me their code was substantively the same as Drafts’ code, but their controls wouldn’t show up until they tried something that I’d never thought of doing myself: they opened the widgets gallery.

Widgets didn’t change in Tahoe, and I have a set I use and like that haven’t changed in months. As a result, I never went into the widget gallery while testing Tahoe, which seems to force a refresh of the Control Center gallery. In retrospect, it sort of makes sense because the underlying technology they use is the same, but it’s still a bug.

Game Tracker is one of more than 25 third-party apps now available in my Control Center setup.

I wish I’d figured this out before publishing my Tahoe review, but if you’re having trouble with Control Center, just open up the widget gallery by right-clicking on your Desktop and selecting “Edit Widgets…” It’s not clear to me if you need to add a widget to your Desktop for the refresh to happen, but that’s what I did, and now my Control Center gallery has more than 25 third-party controls.

My hope is that Apple will fix this bug quickly. If I didn’t discover a workaround for months and after contacting several people, I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect anyone else to find it. At least now, though, MacStories readers know the secret incantation to make third-party controls work. Please spread the word.