Why the Dock is the worst part of macOS
The Dock is fine. It is not broken. It does not crash. And generally, you could even say it is elegant.
But if you think about what you actually need from an app launcher, speed, minimal distraction, no interruption to what you are doing, the Dock fails at almost all of it.
It is in the wrong place
The Dock lives at the edge of your screen. Not near your cursor, not near your work, but at the bottom (or side) of your display, as far as possible from wherever you are actually looking.
Every time you want to launch an app from the Dock, you stop what you are doing, move your cursor to the edge of your screen, find the right icon in a row of roughly similar-looking icons, and click. Then you move back to your work.
This is a small interruption. But it is an interruption every single time. On a large monitor, the distance your cursor travels is significant. On a smaller screen, the dock takes up too much space taking focus away from your work.
The Dock was designed in an era when computer screens were much smaller and you spent your entire day in one or two apps. In that context, a static row of icons at the edge made reasonable sense. That is not how most people use a Mac in 2026.
It is one of the slowest ways to launch apps
This is the thing most people do not say out loud: the Dock has always been a slow way to open apps. Moving your cursor all the way to the edge of the screen, scanning a row of small icons, finding the right one, clicking it. Every single time.
Many people figure this out and ditch the Dock for Spotlight search. Type the first two letters of an app name and press Enter. It is significantly faster than hunting through the Dock, and it works for every app on your Mac, not just the ones you remembered to add.
But even Spotlight requires you to shift your attention, reach for the keyboard, type, and confirm. For apps you open ten times a day, that adds up.
The fastest approach is one where your hands already know where to go before your brain has finished the thought. That is what muscle memory does, and it is what the Dock never gave you. The icons are always in a slightly different position depending on how many apps are open, the row is far from your cursor, and there is nothing to build a reliable spatial habit around.
It is always visible
The Dock takes up permanent screen real estate. On a laptop or smaller display, this is real estate you are paying for all day whether you are using it or not.
You can set the Dock to auto-hide, but then it pops up whenever your cursor approaches the edge of the screen, including the countless times you did not mean to trigger it. The bounce animation, designed to feel alive and responsive, mostly just draws your eye at inopportune moments.
What a better launcher looks like
A radial menu appears right at your cursor. Press a hotkey and your apps are right there, arranged in a circle, a few pixels from where your cursor already is. Pick what you want. The menu closes.
The key difference is that each app always sits in the same position in the circle. After a few days your hand knows where Safari is. After a week you stop looking. At that point, opening an app takes less time than typing its name in Spotlight, because your hand moves before you have consciously decided to. Muscle memory is faster than any search-based launcher, and the Dock never gave you a reliable way to build it.
We are not suggesting you ditch your Dock. It is useful as an indicator of what is currently running. But as a way to open apps, it was never the fastest option, and now there is a better one.
Radial is what we built to replace the launching part. The Dock can stay for the rest.