How to Stop Steam Opening Automatically in Mac OS X

Steam offers many great games for Mac users to enjoy, but if you’re a casual gamer you may not be too excited about having the Steam client open itself automatically when logging in or starting up OS X. Fortunately, if Steam opening itself bothers you, it’s very easy to stop this behavior and only open Steam app when you want to on the Mac.

Do note that Steam has an option toggle buried in it’s settings somewhere to adjust this behavior, but the easiest way to just stop Steam launching itself in OS X is to turn it off from the System Preferences panel, which is what we’ll show here.

Prevent Steam from Opening Itself on Mac

The simplest way to prevent auto-launching of Steam app is to remove it from the Login Items app list of OS X, this is set at a user level, meaning if you have multiple user accounts on a Mac you’d need to repeat this same process for each user on that Mac.

1. Go the  Apple menu and choose “System Preferences”, then go to “Users & Groups”
2. Select the user that is active in OS X, then choose the “Login Items” tab
3. Select “Steam” from this list and then hit the Delete key on the keyboard to remove steam from the automatic launch on login list
4. Close out of System Preferences

The next time you log into that user account or reboot the Mac, Steam will no longer open itself. Instead, if you want to launch the Steam client, you’ll need to open it yourself from the /Applications/ folder, like any other app launched the usual way.

Many applications in OS X attempt to automatically load like this on login, Skype is another common example of an auto-starting app that can be managed the same way through Login Items. Some other apps will attempt to load when a device is connected too, like Photos app opening when an iPhone or camera memory card is attached to the Mac. While this can be helpful, it can also slow down the perceived boot time of a Mac because all of these apps must launch before you’re able to use the computers resources, which is why removing these items can help boost the speed of a reboot or startup of any Mac. If you see a lot of other apps in that list, particularly ones you don’t really need to use immediately at boot, consider removing them as well from the Login Items list of OS X.