The Recent Apps section in the Dock on Mac shows the three most recently used apps that aren’t in the Mac Dock. This is a handy feature for getting back to recently used apps, but if you want to remove one of the apps from the Recent Apps section, you can do that too.
How to Remove App Icons from the Recent Apps Section in the Dock on MacOS
- Drag any app icon from Recent Apps to your Mac desktop.
- Hold down dragging until you see the “Delete” note in place of the app’s name, and then release to remove that app from the Recent Apps section of the Dock.
- Repeat to remove other app icons from Recent Apps in Mac Dock if you like.
In the example screenshot given here, we are removing “Apple Configurator” from the “Recent Apps” section of this Mac Dock.
Any of the three most recent apps will appear here in the Recent Apps section of the Dock unless you manually delete them, as shown here.
If you open the apps again, they will also return to the Recent Apps section.
Whether you enable or disable the Recent Apps section of the Mac Dock is entirely a matter of personal preference, but if you use the feature, you may find this trick to interact with the Recent Apps section of the Dock.
There are other ways to customize the Dock on Mac.