AlDente not working on Mac: what to check

The battery was supposed to hold at 80 percent. This morning it reads 100. Or the opposite: the charger is plugged in, the cable is fine, and the percentage has not moved in an hour. Charge limiting utilities produce a small set of symptoms that look like bugs and mostly are not, because the app is working inside constraints that macOS imposes on any third party process.

Reinstalling is the reflex and it is usually the wrong first move. Sorting the symptom into one of three categories takes a minute and points at a different fix in each case.

Three symptoms, three different causes

The limit is ignored and the battery charges to full. The cause is almost always something happening while nothing can run: sleep, shutdown, a user account switch, or a second system also managing charging.

Charging does not start at all. The power management state is stuck. This has a documented recovery sequence and it differs between Apple silicon and Intel.

The app cannot be found. No menu bar item, no obvious way into settings. This is normally a display setting rather than a failure.

Before working through any of them, confirm the app is actually resident. Check that the process is running in Activity Monitor, and check System Settings for login items so it starts again after a restart. A charge limiter that is not running looks exactly like a charge limiter that is broken.

After a macOS update, the limit sometimes stops applying

A known symptom affects a subset of machines right after a macOS upgrade. The vendor documents it in the FAQ, including the recovery sequence, and states it has not been fixed.

The published steps are: unplug and let the battery discharge below the configured limit, shut the Mac down and close the lid for a few minutes, unplug the power brick from the wall outlet and wait a few minutes, then power on and plug back in and watch whether charging stops at the limit.

Nothing in that sequence touches the app. It resets the power path, which is a strong hint about where the problem lives. If the same symptom returns after every macOS update, adjusting settings inside the app will not prevent it. A more practical response is to stop applying macOS updates automatically, choose a day for them, and spend the following day checking that charging still stops where it should.

When charging refuses to start

The opposite failure, no charging at all, is documented as something that happens when an install or uninstall was interrupted partway through.

On Apple silicon, the published recovery is to leave the Mac plugged in, shut it down, close the lid, wait two minutes, and power it on again. On Intel machines, the fix is an SMC reset, and Apple publishes that procedure on the Apple support site.

The same failure is the reason removal has an order to it. Set the charge limit back to 100 percent, wait about 30 seconds for the change to reach the hardware, and only then quit and remove the app. The removal flow asks for the macOS account password to uninstall the helper application, and a restart afterwards is recommended. That helper is the component that actually applies the limit, so a half removed or half installed helper is exactly the state that produces a Mac which will not charge.

Sleep and shutdown are outside any app's reach

The single most common report is the overnight one: lid closed at 80 percent, opened at 100. This is not a defect. While macOS is asleep, third party apps do not execute and cannot influence charging.

The paid tier works around this with features that stop charging just before sleep begins, hold the limit when the app is closed or the machine is powered off, and keep the Mac awake until the limit is reached. The free tier does not include those, so a closed lid means charging continues to full.

That single fact decides a lot of cases. If the goal is to protect the battery during hours when nobody is at the desk, the free tier cannot do it. If the goal is to hold a limit during a working day at a plugged in desk, the free tier is sufficient.

Sleep being disabled is intentional, in three situations

The mirror image of that report is a Mac that refuses to sleep, or a sleep menu item that appears greyed out. The vendor documents when this happens on purpose.

AlDente Free does not influence or disable Sleep Mode. Source: apphousekitchen.com, read September 10, 2026

In the paid tier, sleep is disabled during calibration so the cycle is not interrupted, during discharge in clamshell mode because of technical constraints when the lid is closed with an external display attached, and while the option to stay awake until the charge limit is reached is active, which applies to Apple silicon machines. The vendor also notes this can affect other apps that manage sleep behaviour, which matters on a machine running several utilities that each hold wake locks.

The paid features disappeared overnight

If everything suddenly behaves like the free tier, check connectivity rather than settings. Licence validation runs at least once every 30 days over the internet. A machine offline longer than that has its licence deactivated and reverts to the free version, and reconnecting is not enough on its own: reactivation is a manual step.

Anyone who works disconnected for long stretches should plan around that. Related, one purchase yields a key valid on up to three macOS user accounts at once, so replacing a machine means deactivating on the old one through the licence management screen before activating on the new one.

Multiple user accounts on one Mac

Fast user switching has been supported since version 1.15, with a condition: the app has to be installed on every account that will be used. Switching to an account without it means charging proceeds toward 100 percent for as long as that session is active.

The documented mitigation is the paid feature that stops charging when the app is closed, which keeps the limit in force across the switch. The vendor also notes that it can take a minute or two for behaviour to stabilise after switching accounts, so a reading taken immediately after the switch is not evidence of anything. On shared family machines, or setups with a separate testing account, this is a frequent cause of a limit that seems to apply only sometimes.

Confirm the machine and the macOS version are in scope

A symptom that never resolves is sometimes a compatibility question that was never checked. The supported range is published and it has edges.

Builds from 1.38 onward support macOS 12 Monterey through macOS 26 Tahoe. macOS 11 Big Sur is served only up to version 1.37.3, which remains available on GitHub. Older systems are not supported at all, and the stated reason is that the interface framework the app is built on does not run on them. Someone holding a Mac back on an older macOS for an unrelated app is therefore holding it on an older build of the charge limiter too, with whatever bugs that build shipped with.

The hardware list is equally specific. It spans MacBook Air and MacBook Pro models going back to 2013, the 12 inch MacBook, and desktop machines including iMac, Mac mini, Mac Studio and Mac Pro on Apple silicon. Apple silicon is supported. A model outside the published list is a plausible explanation for behaviour that never worked properly from the first day, as distinct from behaviour that worked and then stopped.

Windows under Boot Camp is a separate case with a documented answer: enabling Intel Mode and setting a limit makes the limit hold in Boot Camp as well, since it is applied below the operating system.

The distinction worth drawing here is between never worked and stopped working. Never worked points at compatibility, at an unsupported model, or at a build too old for the installed macOS. Stopped working points at the sections above: sleep, an interrupted install, licence validation, an account switch, or a second limiter. Answering that one question before troubleshooting saves the most time of anything on this page.

Overlapping settings and attached hardware

Four situations look like malfunctions and are not.

What is observed	What is documented
Erratic charging behaviour	Two limiters running at once. The vendor recommends setting the macOS charge limit to 100 percent and disabling Optimized Battery Charging while the app is in control
Percentage does not drop during discharge features	While plugged in, the power adapter is the main energy source, so the battery barely loses charge. This is expected
Sudden capacity drop, shutdown near 50 percent	Documented as a calibration drift from sitting at low charge for weeks, corrected by full charge and discharge cycles rather than being battery damage
Disconnects while discharging through a dock	Some third party Thunderbolt docks are reported as incompatible with certain features. Testing with the charger connected directly isolates this

None of these are visible from inside the settings window. All four live outside the app, in the power path, the operating system's own settings, or the battery's state of calibration. The details are published in the vendor FAQ, read on September 10, 2026.

A missing icon is usually a setting, not a crash

For the third symptom, start with the Appearance tab in settings. There is a Hide Menubar Icon option there, and a separate toggle for the Dock icon. With both turned off, the app runs with no visible entry point, and launching it again from the Applications folder brings the window back.

If nobody changed those settings, the item is probably present but buried. Menu bar items grow leftward from the right edge, and on a MacBook with a notch, anything that reaches the notch stops being drawn. That is a width problem, not a fault.

Counting the items and sorting them by how often each gets clicked separates the two cases quickly. A charge limiter usually lands in the middle group: its icon carries live state, showing charging, paused, or discharging, which is worth glancing at and not worth a permanent slot. Items in that middle group are exactly what a menu bar organizer is for, since collapsing them keeps them reachable without keeping them visible. The features page describes how a hidden item gets opened without expanding the bar first, and the FAQ covers the permissions that this class of tool needs from macOS.

What to check first

Work in this order: confirm the app is running and set as a login item, then look for a second system managing charging, then look at the power path and the battery's calibration state. Keep the missing icon question separate, because that one is answered in the Appearance tab or by thinning the menu bar itself. Reinstalling belongs at the end of that list, not the start.