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Background

I'm running Catalina 10.15.7.

I run my macOS system as a limited user (I have admin credentials for admin tasks).

This mostly works fine, but it seems many apps, and sometimes Apple themselves, expect most users to be running their systems as admins.

Problem

Anyway, I had a program installed (Disk Drill), which was running fine, and then prompted me to install an update. I installed the update, and now when I run the program I get an error window that Disk Drill can only be run by admins and then the app exits.

If I launch a terminal window and switch to the admin user and launch the app from the terminal, it starts just fine.

Question

How do I get this app to run as an admin?

Attempted Solutions

I tried changing ownership of the .app and .app/Contents folder to that of the admin user, but this didn't seem to make any difference.

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  • That error window doesn't sound like a macOS message, I suspect it's coming from the program itself. My guess is the developer changed it in an update to display that message if the user isn't an admin, possibly because it was easier than correctly fixing a bug or dealing with support issues. Unfortunately, that would mean there's nothing you can do other than (possibly) downgrading to a previous version of the app.
    – Wowfunhappy
    Commented Oct 19, 2020 at 22:00
  • What version of Disk Drill? Seems ithat error might need some tune up since running as admin is a windows feature, not something Finder needs or even has. Kudos for running as a standard user. This is excellent practice when you don’t have trust in some apps.
    – bmike ♦
    Commented Oct 19, 2020 at 22:00
  • I'm using the latest version available from their front page (which is the same version that was automatically downloaded by my installed version). I also contacted their chat support and was given a beta version that exhibits the same behavior. So, from the answers and comments here I've learned that this is likely an app problem and not a macOS problem.
    – Daniel
    Commented Oct 20, 2020 at 2:24
  • Can you please add your solution as an answer below?
    – nohillside ♦
    Commented Jan 29, 2021 at 11:41
  • The edit I made is not a "solution" to the question I asked: "How to run an installed application as an admin?" That question is best answered, or solved, by the answer I marked as best below: namely that the question doesn't really have relevance in the macOS security paradigm as it does in Windows. My edit is more of a tangent as to the specific status of a specific program which inspired the more general question which is the actual topic of this post. I thought, erroneously, that my specific problem was part of a general problem. My edit is not a solution or answer to the question.
    – Daniel
    Commented Jan 29, 2021 at 12:48

3 Answers 3

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On macOS the Finder hands off application starts to an admin cleared process named launchd. You don’t really have to do anything to run as admin since all apps run as admin when programmed to do so. What macOS does differently than windows is sandbox details and some files being immutable / read only / protected.

The closest analogous item might be adding the disk drill app to Full Disk Access, but I would check with the vendor and release notes before adding it unless you are sure it’s working correctly or have a backup.

This message isn’t really correct on macOS and wasn’t on OS X before either.

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  • Thanks for the explanation of apps and admin authentication in macOS. Makes sense. Disk Drill does have Full Disk Access, but it doesn't detect it appropriately (even when I launch as an admin user from the terminal). This seems to be a separate issue.
    – Daniel
    Commented Oct 20, 2020 at 2:22
  • Boo - I've never really tested Disk Drill, but I know it's super useful to lots of people. Hopefully someone a little more familiar can help - +1 on your question - sorry for not voting it up earlier. I hope to learn from it, too @Daniel
    – bmike ♦
    Commented Oct 20, 2020 at 2:45
  • 2
    This is actually a Disk Drill issue. I assumed something had gone wrong with the update and I could fix it myself from within macOS, but it seems this will be something that Disk Drill devs will have to fix internally. Everything was working fine in the older version of Disk Drill I was using, but I'm not sure if the older version is fully compatible with Catalina (I haven't used Disk Drill in a while).
    – Daniel
    Commented Oct 20, 2020 at 2:55
  • Update: I received this response from Disk Drill tech support: "For security reasons, the developers had to change the way Disk Drill works, you now need to use it under the admin account. If you can't, we can suggest a few workarounds:" (S)he then suggests I use sudo to launch Disk Drill from the terminal (this partially works) or that I run the program in "portable" mode. Is there any technical or architectural reason why a data recovery program like this legitimately cannot run under a standard user account, or should I press them more to fix this issue?
    – Daniel
    Commented Nov 5, 2020 at 1:51
  • Every app developer has to choose how they program, so there are very good sandboxed apps. Look at Daisy Disk - if you want to see an app that respects all OS sandbox entitlements, measures all it can as a standard user and has a slick privileged helper that you can choose to run as root (one time) and then the standard user can launch it without root / admin @Daniel
    – bmike ♦
    Commented Nov 5, 2020 at 2:17
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I used the terminal to temporarily run the program in question as superuser/root to solve this.

In my case PyCharm CE asked to be run as a privileged user to update itself. I looked for PyCharm CE in the /Applications - folder (use ls /Applications to search).

For the cases I have encountered it follows a particular structure where there is a command to run the program in the folder /Applications/<app name>.app/Contents/MacOS

which I run as superuser/root with sudo:

sudo /Applications/PyCharm\ CE.app/Contents/MacOS/pycharm

(The \ backslash is because there is a space in the name.)

I would then update it from within the program itself, exit and restart it as a normal user.

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The more general, and imo useful, answer here is given in the selected answer, and that is that if a program in macOS complains about not being able to run as a Standard User, it's either an intentional design decision, or, more likely, lazy or incorrect code that does not follow the macOS security paradigm.

Either way, you probably won't find a solution within the OS, but rather, by contacting the developer directly and asking them to "fix" their code.

If you're looking for a more specific answer as to what happened with my Disk Drill problem, read on:

Final Updates

I neglected to update this thread so I'll provide a summary here. Disk Drill did attempt to give me workarounds, but I wasn't getting a firm commitment about plans to actually fix this issue. After a couple more emails where I explained that:

  1. Disk Drill used to work fine before under a Standard User account,
  2. There is no technical reason why Disk Drill should not be able to run from a Standard User in MacOS (thanks to explanations given here in the selected answer), and
  3. Running a system as a Standard User is a common and fairly routine security best practices,

I guess my emails were finally forwarded to the right person because as of November 9, 2020 I was told that the developers were "going to fix the issue in the next update".

Satisfied with that response, I kind of forgot about the issue because I didn't actually need Disk Drill at that moment. Well, today (January 28, 2021) I decided to download the latest version of Disk Drill from their website and I'm happy to report that it seems to work just fine running as a Standard User under MacOS Big Sur (11.1).

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