Since Yosemite and in every later operating system OS X/macOS runs coreduetd from /usr/libexec/coreduetd with the bundle-id com.apple.coreduetd.osx in the background.
- What exactly is this process doing?
- On which hardware does this run (i.e.: is its functionality supported)?
- Can it be disabled?
- How can it be disabled?
- Should it be disabled?
- What are the (potential) side effects of it being disabled (dependencies)?
This question should not be read as a YX-Problem but an attempt to eventually add to the list of canonical questions.
Best Answer
There's not much on the web as to what
coreduetd
does on a Mac other than "it's used for Handoff between iOS and macOS."It's keeping track of your various system and application states including states across your Apple devices.
Technically, yes using
launchctl
. Though, I (highly) don't recommend doing so.Completely subjective question. Only you can decide if this is the right course for you. Again, I recommend that you don't.
Potentially, the following may be affected:
However doing a little sleuthing, I was able to find an iOS security research project (on http://sans.org) that examined the
coreduet.db
file on iOS. I applied that thinking to thecoreduet.db
file on macOS. Here's what I found...Making a copy of the
coreduet.db
file, I examined it in sqlite3 by first getting a list of all the tablesIt appears that there is a number of events it keeps track of. However, to see what we could see, I opened up the Z_PRIMARYKEY table:
This particular database appears to track system events. Given that I am on a iMac, it would make sense that I don't have things like "BatteryEvent" or "PlugInEvent", but I would have "AppStateChangeEvents". "AirplaneMode" is a bit confusing as this is an iMac, but I do generally keep my WiFi off except for testing; at some point, this state was added to the database.
Going a bit further into the CCDMAirplaneModeEvent, we can see that it tracks not just when, but where the event took place (though my database has
0
data for those fields) and by whom.