I think this is less a "macOS lacks the feature to prevent focus stealing" and more they never even imagined the scenario where it takes time for the app to open. Instead of even considering that a user may add inputs while waiting for launch, potentially signaling that they are no longer requesting focus from the program they clicked on, they simply designed for the optimistic case where there never IS time for the user to give these inputs before their intention of opening the program is completed. Not saying it's any less bad from a user's perspective, but I think there's a difference in mindset here.

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SoftTalker 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

In my experience (admittedly a bit dated now) Mac apps always take a few "bounces" to launch and be ready. There are a lot of nice things about MacOS but snappy application launches isn't one that stands out for me.

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trentor 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Focus management has never been Quartz's strong suit.

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ghusto 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

As always, Apple has designed for the happy flow, and nothing else. Mac apps have never opened instantly, this is nothing new.

	▲	cosmic_cheese 42 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		They can open nearly instantly, but they need to be well-built native apps. Lumbering behemoths like Adobe CC or anything Chrome-based is going to be a bit slow, and even smaller apps that pull in a big foreign UI toolkit are going to take a tick or two longer to start. It’s too bad that the art of building lightweight applications is becoming a lost art.
	▲	cmiller1 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		On the current M series hardware, in my experience, it's rare for the icon to land from its first bounce before the software is up and ready.