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App history on a Mac: how to see what an app has used

· 5 min read

There is no App history tab on a stock Mac, so macOS does not give you one list of what each app has used. The closest built-in view is System Settings > Battery, which charts battery use over time for the whole Mac, not per app. For a running total per app, with CPU time, disk, network and energy, Foreman has an App History page that counts from the moment each app opened. This post explains the Windows idea, what a Mac offers, and how to read the figures.

What App history means on Windows

On Windows, Task Manager has an App history tab. It lists apps with the resources they have used over a period, such as processor time and network use. The idea is a running total, rather than the live figure on the Processes tab. A program that was busy an hour ago and is idle now still shows how much it used.

That distinction is the useful one. A live figure tells you what is happening this second. A total tells you what an app has cost you since you opened it, and that is often the better clue for questions like “what drained my battery this afternoon” or “which app uploaded all that data”.

What a stock Mac gives you

macOS spreads this across a few places, and none of them is a per-app total with several columns.

  • System Settings > Battery charts battery level and usage over the last 24 hours and the last 10 days. It tells you when the battery went down, but not which app took it.
  • System Settings > General > Storage shows where your disk space goes. It is about what is stored, not what an app has read or written.
  • The Force Quit window (Option-Command-Escape) lists your apps and nothing else about them.

If you use Terminal, ps -o time= -p followed by a process ID prints the processor time that process has used since it started, which is the same idea as the CPU time column below. It covers one process at a time, and only the processor. How to see which app is using the most CPU on a Mac covers the CPU side in plain steps.

Foreman’s App History page

Open Foreman with Control-Shift-Escape, then choose App History in the sidebar. For each app it shows what that app has used since it opened:

  • Open for: how long the app has been running.
  • CPU time: the total processor time the app has used.
  • Disk read and Disk written: the amount of data it has read from and written to storage.
  • Network: its network use.
  • Energy: the energy it has used, in watt-hours.

Sort by Energy to see which apps have drained the battery since they opened. The Network and CPU time columns show which app has moved the most data and which has done the most work.

How to read the columns

CPU time is not the same as how busy the processor is right now. It is a running total of work. An app that has been open for three days with a low CPU time has hardly worked. A browser with a high CPU time that you opened an hour ago has worked hard. Compare CPU time against Open for, and a big number next to a short time open is the one to look at.

Disk written shows which apps write the most data. An app that writes a lot, such as a video editor or a sync tool, shows it here. A large figure for an app you were not using is worth a look. How to find what’s writing to your Mac’s disk goes into it.

Network is the app’s network use since it opened. Use it to spot an app that has uploaded or downloaded far more than you expected, for example a cloud sync client or a backup. How to see which app is using your network on a Mac has more on that.

Energy is in watt-hours. A watt-hour is a unit of energy: an app that used 2 watt-hours drew that much from the battery or the wall. On a laptop, the apps near the top of this list are the ones that have cost you the most battery since they opened. It is a measure of use, not a battery health reading, and Foreman does not show battery health.

The limits to know about

Two limits matter.

First, the totals last as long as the app stays open. They are not kept after the app quits. If you quit and reopen Safari, its row starts again from zero. This is different from a long-term history, so if you want to know what an app used last Tuesday, App History cannot tell you.

Second, there are no per-process history graphs. The page is a table of totals, not a chart over time. For a live graph, the Performance page shows a minute of history for the whole Mac, with the apps using the most underneath.

Those limits suit the question the page answers: what has this app used since I opened it. To answer it, open the app, use it as you normally do, and look at the row later.

A practical routine

  1. Use your Mac as usual for an hour or two.
  2. Open Foreman and go to App History.
  3. Sort by Energy if the battery is the concern, or look down the Network or Disk written column for those.
  4. Find the app near the top, and compare its row with how long it has been open.
  5. If an app you do not need is using a lot, quit it. If you need it open but not right now, Efficiency Mode can hold it back while it is in the background. Efficiency Mode on a Mac: how to slow down a background app explains it.

Foreman is $12 once, free for the first 24 hours, and runs on macOS 14 Sonoma or later. If a stock Mac answer is enough for you, System Settings > Battery is the place to start. If you want per-app totals across CPU, disk, network and energy in one table, that is the gap App History fills.