Adobe Desktop Service wants to use the "Local Items" keychain. Why? For InDesign only. Not CC.

Do I delete "Adobe Desktop Service" if I only use InDesign?

I use InDesign only. Not Creative Cloud (CC)

By @Troy Deckert

If any subscription version of InDesign is used, then Creative Cloud is being used. Because even if InDesign is the only Creative Cloud app you ever use, InDesign relies on Creative Cloud background processes for various things such as licensing verification, Adobe Fonts, Creative Cloud Libraries, Share for Review, help files and tutorials loaded from Adobe servers, and so on.

And the way you install or update InDesign or other apps is using the Creative Cloud desktop app, so for any Creative Cloud user on a computer, it is not possible to use less than two Creative Cloud apps: The one they want to use, and the Creative Cloud desktop app that they need for installing and updating the app they use.

It’s like if someone said “I only use iMovie, not macOS.” No, using iMovie is only possible within macOS and running macOS components. Or “I only live in Chicago, not Illinois, not the USA.” Nope, Chicago only exists inside and within the laws of Illinois and the USA.

It’s normal for Adobe to use the Apple Keychain, because any app can store data securely in there, and many do, usually about user accounts. You can use the Keychain Access app (included with your Mac) to inspect what various apps are storing in your Keychain. When I open Keychain Access and look in mine, I see the typical use of the Apple Keychain to secure account credentials by many companies including Apple, Adobe, Google, Microsoft, WordPress, and Zoom.

For these reasons it is not unusual or necessarily a problem if Adobe chooses to use the Keychain, and I don’t think it’s a problem if you see that password request once or maybe twice and then you don’t see it for a long time or ever again. But if comes up a lot, that’s probably something not working right, and that is worth troubleshooting.

(Tip: If you ever forget a wifi password that your Mac has used to connect in the past, it’s probably in the Keychain. I have used this when a friend or relative has to enter their own network’s wifi password, like for a new device, and forgot what their wifi password was. I just say, let’s take a look in your Mac’s Keychain.)

Finally, yes, there are ways to delete some of the background Creative Cloud processes. But it can be a lot of wasted effort because the next time you want to update anything related to Creative Cloud, the Creative Cloud desktop app installer might notice that typical components are not there, and might simply re-install them.  And you haven’t accounted for the many other background processes that macOS and other apps run, which you can see in macOS Activity Monitor, in the CPU tab. They tend to to have little effect on overall system performance, according to the low CPU percentages listed for them there. (For one thing, the Apple Silicon CPU will run low priority background processes on the efficiency cores, not the performance cores.)

Here are a couple links which seem to describe this issue:

https://www.ravbug.com/tutorials/stop-adobe-daemons/

https://community.adobe.com/t5/download-install-discussions/mac-unable-to-disable-processes-adobe-desktop-service-cc-library-ccxprocess-adobe-installer/td-p/10086121