Background
I'm running Catalina 10.15.7.
I run my macOS system as a limited user (I have admin credentials for admin tasks).
This mostly works fine, but it seems many apps, and sometimes Apple themselves, expect most users to be running their systems as admins.
Problem
Anyway, I had a program installed (Disk Drill), which was running fine, and then prompted me to install an update. I installed the update, and now when I run the program I get an error window that Disk Drill can only be run by admins and then the app exits.
If I launch a terminal window and switch to the admin user and launch the app from the terminal, it starts just fine.
Question
How do I get this app to run as an admin?
Attempted Solutions
I tried changing ownership of the .app and .app/Contents folder to that of the admin user, but this didn't seem to make any difference.
Best Answer
On macOS the Finder hands off application starts to an admin cleared process named
launchd. You don’t really have to do anything to run as admin since all apps run as admin when programmed to do so. What macOS does differently than windows is sandbox details and some files being immutable / read only / protected.The closest analogous item might be adding the disk drill app to Full Disk Access, but I would check with the vendor and release notes before adding it unless you are sure it’s working correctly or have a backup.
This message isn’t really correct on macOS and wasn’t on OS X before either.