Amphetamine and Caffeine will not keep Teams or Slack active (here is the fix)

You installed Amphetamine or Caffeine, turned it on, stepped away for a few minutes, and came back to find your Teams or Slack dot still showing Away. It feels like it should work. It does not. Here is why, and what actually does the job.

What Amphetamine and Caffeine actually do

Amphetamine, Caffeine, KeepingYouAwake, and every app in this category do one thing well: they stop your Mac from going to sleep and stop the screensaver from kicking in. That is genuinely useful for long downloads, video playback, or running an unattended script.

When one of these apps is active, your display stays on and your Mac stays awake. That is all they change.

Why that still leaves you Away in chat apps

Teams and Slack do not look at whether your Mac is sleeping to decide your status. They look at input activity: keystrokes, mouse movement, and which app has focus. macOS tracks the time since your last input as the system idle timer. When that timer crosses a threshold - roughly five minutes for Teams, and idle or screen-lock for Slack - the app marks you Away.

A keep-awake app never touches that timer. It talks to a different macOS API (the power assertion system) that says "do not sleep." The idle timer keeps ticking regardless. So your screen stays on, your Mac stays awake, and your chat dot still goes yellow right on schedule. The two systems do not talk to each other.

The fix: reset the idle timer

To stay green in Teams, Slack, Zoom, and every other presence-aware app, something has to reset the system idle timer directly. When the timer is reset, every app that reads it sees you as active at once - you do not need a separate fix per app.

Stay Green does exactly that. Once you have actually gone idle (not while you are actively typing), it sends a single harmless keystroke (F15, which does nothing visible) and a zero-distance mouse move. The idle timer resets. Your dot stays green. Nothing jumps on screen, nothing moves your cursor, and Stay Green lives quietly in the menu bar with no Dock icon.

It also auto-pauses when you have genuinely left for an extended time, so it will not keep you showing green at midnight or over the weekend.

Keep your keep-awake app too if you like

Amphetamine and Stay Green solve different problems. If you need your Mac to stay awake during a long compile or while watching a presentation, Amphetamine is still the right tool for that. If you also need your chat status to stay green while you read, take a call, or step away briefly, Stay Green handles the piece that Amphetamine cannot.

They do not conflict: you can run both at the same time and get both benefits.

For more detail on each app specifically: keep Microsoft Teams green on Mac and keep Slack green on Mac.