I bought an app (Soundpad) through Steam that I open and close frequently/leave open, yet I don't want to annoy my friends with constant status updates or have that be my default always on status.
Is there a way that I can have this app open without having it occupy my status on a per app basis?
Here is a little table combination of how I want it to act:
Game1 | Game2 | Status
------+-------+-------
RL | App | RL
RL | | RL
App | |[online]
| |[online]
This does not appear to be possible unless the developers of the particular application make a change to said application. There are a few Steam Community posts that discuss this, with this one noting that the developers for an application called DimmDrive were able to change it so that it does not report the status of your software to your friends.
Other posts like this one basically discuss how this feature would be nice, but it does not currently exist. The ability to hide statuses for particular games/applications just isn't supported.
I believe I use to have a software application (Precision X) that would indicate I was "playing" it, even though it was just a utility for managing my GPU and not an actual game. So unless the developers modify their application to not report the status at all, then it looks like you may be stuck.
If you launch an app directly without using Steam (i.e. from the .exe/.app/.whatever-linux-format-they-used) it may not launch through Steam, but it is possible for them to use Steam as DRM in which case the client will be automatically launched if not running, and I believe the app will be attached to it if it's already running (and it should popup as you "playing it" if so) but I never experimented with that so IDK personally.
This self-answered question about directly launching apps is for Mac, but the directions to find the executable are nearly the same across systems except replacing .app with .exe/.whatever and "Get Info" with "Properties".
