MacOS provides a more clean, fast, and stable environment than Windows operating system but MacOS applications can be frozen or become unresponsive sometimes. If an application for MacOS frozen it should be forced to quit. There are different ways to force quit apps in MacOS.
Force Quit App via Popup Menu
When an application is opened its icon is located on the Dock. This icon provides some actions via its menu Options
and Force Quit
. Just click on the application icon and select Force Quit
.
Force Quit App via Menu Bar
The Menu Bar provides the currently active application menu items and this can be used to force quit an application.
- Click the
Apple
menu icon via the menu bar. - Select the
Force Quit
menu item where also the application name is displayed. - The
Force Quit Applications
menu is displayed. Select the application you want to quit and click on theForce Quit
button on the left bottom corner.
Force Quit App via Activity Monitor
MacOS provides the Activity Monitor
in order to monitor running applications and processes with their resource usage. The Activity Monitor also provides some useful features where one of which is the ability to force quit application. Open the Activity Monitor and select the process you want to force quit.

Force Quit App via Terminal (Command Line Interface)
The command line interface provides the ability to kill or force quit an application. First, the application’s PID (process ID) should be listed with the ps aux
command below.
$ ps aux
Now we can kill the application with the kill
command. If the application is opened with Administrative privileges we should use the sudo
command kill command.
$ sudo kill 4234