Why is hiding the tray icon not recommended?

[amn]

Is there a deeper reason to it than I suspect, which is simply to warn people because they might e.g. not know the application is "active"/"running"/"doing its job"? Because I don't really think an icon is necessary -- after all, on Mac OS which is capable of switching between light and dark themes on its own automatically based on sunset/sunrise kind of schedule, there is no dedicated icon, nor do I think one is always needed. To that end, I have hidden the icon though the settings, and simply trust the switching that I have set up, to work. If I need to change settings or do anything with the application, I can find it in the Start Menu and e.g. have it open its window from there -- even if it's already running (meaning I don't benefit much from the tray icon except for the context menu which I don't miss).

Am I missing something?

Thank you for a very useful application. I've had a Powershell script I wrote that did much the same thing but it didn't toggle the desktop background and instead of bothering to develop the script further, I installed this application :)

[Armin2208]

There is a big difference between automation made by the system and an app running in the background.

If Windows or MacOS would show an icon for every service running on the background, you would have 200 tray icons. This could be confusing. An operating system can do general things without needing to display a background activity indicator. It still makes sense to enable some tray icons for operating system processes, like for example the Windows Update installation progress on Windows 7. Because it indicates some more heavy process is going on and the user might want to know that.

Apps on the other hand are third party code running on your operating system. If an app wants to enable some background functionality, the app always needs to run in the background. So it's a standard method that every app which runs on the background should indicate that as a tray icon. It's like a place to show that Apps still running in the background, although not showing a window - or enabling apps to display some notifications or status.

In recent times, this scheme was kinda broken by modern app notifications and some other weird stuff. But I think it is better if every app running in the background signals it with a tray icon. It could make sense to have some exclusions - for example browser updater which run 24/7 and don't need a tray icon for that.

We don't recommend it, because we think the user should know if ADM service is running or not.

[amn]

Hi Armin, thank you for thorough elaboration. I understand the general principles at play here, I have written both Win32 and UWP applications myself. I disagree with your assessment though -- as a user, knowing that UWP applications can hook into background processing irrespective of having a tray icon -- since I have no guarantees a given UWP application isn't hooked up to receive notifications (read: is external event driven / gets "woken up" or activated by Windows on external conditions), presence of an icon doesn't do much for me except eat up the screen estate and consequently my visual attention. To put it in a different way, I can't tell if Windows Auto Night Mode is or isn't able to do it's job (automagically switch themes as necessary throughout a 24 hour cycle) with vs. without a tray icon. I have it auto-starting with Windows, so I am pretty sure I can rely on it being running.

The only downside of not having a tray icon for me would be that I wouldn't know if the application crashes, but as far as I remember there are ways for Windows to have an UWP application recover from these kind of conditions.

In summary: for a UWP application, the distinction between a system service and a third-party application, is made ever more blurry, hence my asking specifically why removing tray icon isn't recommended. Now that I know the explanation:

We don't recommend it, because we think the user should know if ADM service is running or not.

...I can make an educated decision as to whether I prefer to see the icon or not (and I don't like to hide icons, because I do hope to have some overview of what is running, although ironically I have very little control of it anyway).

All this said, I appreciate your explanation, it's generally very sound. It is because I consider Auto Night Mode such a relatively necessary (eye strain!) service, that I don't need to know it is running -- I trust that it does and the icon becomes a distraction. Feel free to take it as a compliment to the utility of the service you guys wrote ;)