Just to be fair: I installed a copy of IntelliJ IDEA on my macOS. It was the trial version. I use Spotlight (and a year back, Alfred) to launch my all applications. However, Spotlight couldn't find the app for it's life, even if it found all the other apps in the same directory.
After I upgraded to the paid app, the problem suddenly fixed itself. But I keep having shivers. It shouldn't be Spotlight's business.
I've experienced similar. My most pleasant experience with finding and launching applications is, surprisingly, in Linux. I think it's best in breed now. If you'd told me this 15 years ago I wouldn't have believed you, but it's gotten much better over the years and everything else has somehow gotten worse. I spend more time using Linux as a desktop OS than anything else these days, and it "just works".
I think dmenu is a good example of this. It's a common launcher application that's (at least) known to all i3 users. Here's a succinct explanation from the man page:
"dmenu is a dynamic menu for X, which reads a list of newline-separated items from stdin. When the user selects an item and presses Return, their choice is printed to stdout and dmenu terminates. Entering text will narrow the items to those matching the tokens in the input.
dmenu_run is a script used by dwm(1) which lists programs in the user's $PATH and runs the result in their $SHELL."
In practice you press Super + D, type a few letters to match the name of your program (such as "fox" for "firefox"), and press enter. It's so fast that any delay is near imperceptible even on older hardware. It also accepts command line arguments if you don't care to read the stdout from the process. This is a stupidly simple program that works with no configuration unless you want to change the font size.
dmenu is so refreshingly simple. There's no attempt at being clever, no attempt at using “AI” to figure out what you mean; it just does a stupid deterministic search and lists the results alphabetically. There’s exactly zero chance for it to suddenly incorrectly second guess your command.
My only gripe about it was that it would’ve been useful to be able to write math expressions in it like you can in Spotlight... so I made a wrapper script which adds that :) https://github.com/mortie/mmenu
It has default submodules to replace dmenu_run, a similar mode that lists the XDG applications (akin to the Start Menu you get on Mint, Fedora or other full-fat DE), SSH that parses `~/.ssh/config`, a dmenu-compatible mode for scripts and a Python API to implement custom modes.
Linux is vastly superior in stability, package management and just basic productivity.
There are of course still trade-offs such as drivers which, although so much better than what they used to be decades ago, are still not quite on par with the ones released for Windows in most instances. That being said, if you plan ahead a bit with your hardware purchases you'll have a great experience under Linux.
What DE do you use? Back when I used Unity in Ubuntu I found their search widget really hard to use. It was laggy and mixed in results from the web, their 'appstore', and my files.
Now I use dmenu in i3wm and I couldn't be happier. All I need is something that searches my path for applications... and that's what it does.
The Unity search menu was really frustrating. It had confusing category buttons, and if you did a search that only had results in a specific category, it would inexplicably turn on that category filter and use it for future searches too until you cleared the textbox. I loved pretty much everything about Unity except for that baffling bit. I'm almost glad they're killing Unity just so it means people aren't subjected to that wacky design decision or bug.
Not at my computer, so can't provide a detailed answer yet. It's GNOME something-or-other though. Not Unity. And the menu is question that just works is accessible from something like Alt-F2 or the super key (it's muscle memory and I'd need to be at a keyboard to say for sure).
I've had the same problem with Spark and even Xcode, so very unlikely it's Apple willfully refusing to index. What fixes it for me is reindexing via going into Spotlight preferences and adding /Applications to the list of folders not to index, then removing it.
This sounds like a series of coincidences more than anything. Spotlight has to index your drive at intervals so, if you recently added an app, it's possible that the app hadn't been indexed yet by Spotlight. Then, by the time you had done the upgrade to paid, Spotlight had indexed the file and and then it started working. There's nothing nefarious going on there. It just sounds like a coincidence.
I can speak to this too. Latest version of MacOS. I installed Spotify weeks ago, and Spotlight just never indexed it (it's in the /Applications folder). I use Spotlight to launch every app... except Spotify, which it can't find.
What fixes it for me is reindexing via going into Spotlight preferences and adding /Applications to the list of folders not to index, then removing it.
I don't know what the priors are, but Spotlight having missed the app for a 30 full days, and then suddenly finding it after the full registration, sounds very unlikely to me.
However, I do believe it's just an unfortunate bug, nothing more sinister there. Still would be nice to know: why?
A bug kept it from indexing the app when you first installed it. Forcing a re-index of /Applications would have fixed it, likewise duplicating the app and deleting the original.
When you registered the app I assume it modified itself, triggering a re-index.
If more non-store Mac apps had an "Install" process, you would.
But you're just dragging a special type of folder off a disk image, so nah.
This was a weird coincidence or bug, nothing more. I've used free and trial versions of IntelliJ on Macs countless times without search ever having issues with them. It's hard to imagine how you'd even make the system work in that way, as an app developer.
Did you ever open the folder which contains the app? Spotlight at least used to use the Launch Services database which was … idiosyncratic … about updating things. The Finder displaying it would reliably trigger that.
The other thing was, naturally, it has a database behind the scenes which historically was prone to silently breaking with no UI cue. Back when I did Mac system administration one of our scripts ran this periodically to deal with missing or duplicate entries in e.g. the Open with… menu:
/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister -kill -seed -r -f -v -domain local -domain user -domain system
The other thing you can try is nuking the Spotlight database:
mdutil -E -a
That'll be slow for a little while as it reindexes whatever it's configured to index but it fixed a fair number of odd problems, which often turned out to be due to previously-unknown hardware issues.
It persisted for the whole month of the trial period. I rebooted multiple times during that period and also checked the Spotlight settings for a few times that they wouldn't exclude anything - and nope.
Another vote for Alfred, here. I use it for launching absolutely everything, so when I install something new I notice how long it takes to be available. Couple of seconds max, every time.
After I upgraded to the paid app, the problem suddenly fixed itself. But I keep having shivers. It shouldn't be Spotlight's business.