How does one transfer old apps from one Mac to a new Mac?

I have some app on my old iMac (Dasiy Disk, MS Word, etc) that I want to install on a new MacBook Pro. What is the best way to do that?

I tried taking some of the apps and saving copies in Dropbox and then opening from the new Mac. That didn't work.

The best approach would be to reinstall the apps afresh. However, that may not always be desirable, as it will involve a lot of work.

For e.g. user has heavily customised the apps, the apps have a lot of preferences items which the user has spent hours tweaking, or the apps have plugins that the user has installed etc.

With fresh install approach, these actions will be have to be meticulously repeated and is prone to human error.

To handle this scenario, preferences export can be performed in various ways. For e.g. many apps save their preferences in file(s) under Library. If such file(s) can be reliably identified, the user can copy them over in the corresponding location in the new system. Some apps maintain their preferences in an easily accessible configuration text files which can be copied over.

The previous approach may still involve a lot of work and may not be desirable. A simpler approach would be using macOS Migration Assistant. This feature lets you easily transfer settings, apps and data from one Mac to another.

A very helpful and concise guide on Migration Assistnat and its usage can be found in the Apple Support Article, How to move your content to a new Mac.

Your best bet for an automatic process is running Migration Assistant on the new / destination Mac. It will ask you to connect the old Mac in target disk mode or connect a Time Machine backup of the old Mac. If you don’t want to use target disk mode - you can also use Disk Utility / Carbon Copy Cloner / Super Duper to make a bootable clone of your old Mac to an external drive and connect that when Migration Assistant asks for the old Mac to be connected.

From there - it can move over user accounts, applications and/or settings and other files from the old Mac to the new Mac.

Lots of good examples here:

• Migrating to new iMac, what does Migration Assistant actually migrate?
• Recovering all my old settings, apps etc ... from removed hard drive
• Best way to move to a new Mac
• How can I transfer data from a G5 iMac to an i7 iMac?