The launcher crashes when you try to open it (on macOS 12)

@unknown, I added your workaround to the description. If I summarized it incorrectly, please let me know.

@pine1needle I guess it works only if you have launcher already installed. I don't have launcher installed and nothing works for me, it just won't build a launcher folder and I don't have any other computer with MacOS 11 to copy files from. Unfortunately the only way to install and run Minecraft on M1 MacOS 12 machine is to use a 3rd party launcher for now, as @Yoshimasa Niwa said. Hope you will manage to fix it soon. 

@pine1needle I probably found better workaround. Open Terminal.app and use following command:

open -a /Applications/Minecraft.app --args --skipUpdate

In this way, we can skip problematic updater without disconnecting from the internet.

But still, it requires original ~/Library/Application Support/minecraft.

I have the same issue.  Similarly, without copying over the application support directory from a different machine, none of these workarounds allow launching

Hey, this is my first comment here so hopefully I'm doing this right. My apologies to everyone who has run into this bug in the last week or so. I've been trying to find the time to post to this for around a week now. I just need to do another round of testing and compile my report, but I've been able to consistently reproduce this, think I have narrowed down the problem, and believe I have a simple and elegant one-time workaround that should work for any user. Hopefully, I'll be back with the rest of my information before the night is over. I just thought I should post some sort of announcement given the boost in activity on this in the last two days.

I have the same problem. Just downloaded Minecraft on macOS Monterey and the Launcher opens for the fraction of a second and then crashes instantly.

The proposed solutions here don't work for me, because there's no Minecraft-folder on my computer (fresh installation of the game).

Please fix this issue, Mojang …

I have very detailed workaround for this problem, but only for those who can understand what following instructions mean.

The problem is the nativeUpdater is calling AppKit API from non main thread.
However, we can bypass that problematic AppKit API call, which is not essential for updater behavior.

First, current distributed Minecraft.app contains nativeUpdater which SHA256 is 85e795049588f459ee4fe573a3080aed52bb524de12d82340cd0a861bca1cf8e.

Run codesign --remove-signature nativeUpdater, then rewrite je instruction 0x74 at 0x572f to jmp instruction 0xeb.

Run xattr -r -d com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Minecraft.app to bypass GateKeeper.
Then run Minecraft.app once.

It will no longer crash and download the latest nativeUpdater, but then crash because it runs updated nativeUpdater, which is still problemetic.

The latest nativeUpdater which SHA256 is c25ed91f224073c52d276118505fd9d0110815c8f63776a4da2d336ffd595e04.

Do same workaround for it, run codesign --remove-signature nativeUpdater, then rewrite je instruction 0x74 at 0x54af (position is changed) to jmp instruction 0xeb.

Now we have non crash-able Minecraft.app to download initial ~/Application Support/minecraft. Simply run Minecraft.app then good to go!

Form now, you can use open -a /Applications/Minecraft.app --args --skipUpdate to play Minecraft until we have official nativeUpdater binary which doesn't call AppKit API from non main thread.

@Yoshimasa Niwa this is interesting, thanks for the sleuthing! Would it be worth distributing a small app that automates these patches, until Microsoft gets around to releasing a working version? Having to re-download the app to get updates working is bad, especially since folks who haven't migrated from old Minecraft accounts are still totally locked out and don't seem to have any way to do a fresh download.

@Glyph Lefkowitz Sure thing, here it is. Created a simple patcher script https://gist.github.com/niw/21160b97b1cd30cae322f768aba73573

Usage:
1. Download Minecraft.dmg, open it and drag Minecraft.app to /Applications.
2. Open Terminal, then run following command. It's long oneline, just simply download previous script and run. If you're worrying what it is doing, read script first.

curl -fsSL 'https://gist.githubusercontent.com/niw/21160b97b1cd30cae322f768aba73573/raw/f598803b8143badd7b01c32e657cd2644477f289/minecraft_nativeupdater_patcher.sh'|sh

3. It should say "Patched." if it's not saying so, probably they updated the binary, so this script will no longer work.

4. Open Minecraft once. It will update updater itself and crash.
5. Run previous command again in Terminal.
6. It should say "Patched." if it's not saying so, probably they updated binary, so this script will no longer work.
7. Open Minecraft once again.
8. It will download ~/Application Support/minecraft.
9. To play Minecraft, use following command on Terminal to not update updater again.

open -a /Applications/Minecraft.app --args --skipUpdate

@Yoshimasa Niwa it worked for me Thank You!

I've also been running into this issue.

It was really confusing for me because:

1. It didn't happen for the first few days after I installed Monterey (presumably because it didn't try to update). That made me think the issue might not be purely due to the OS upgrade, which threw off some of my debugging efforts.

2. It only happened on one out of 2 computers I upgraded to Monterey.

3. The mode of failure was pretty inscrutable, and I didn't find anything useful by trying to research the stack trace.

After a few weeks of trying to debug it myself, I was glad to to find this in the bug tracker!

The --skipUpdate argument works well for now (thanks for the details, Yoshimasa Niwa!), but it would definitely be nice to see this fixed (especially so I don't have to tell my friends caveats about upgrading their OS).

The new version of the Launcher (2.2.7956) does not fix the issue by the way. I installed it by downloading it on an Intel-Mac which is not on Monterey (which worked flawlessly) and copying the data to my main Mac.

The workaround still works, but normally opening the Launcher still crashes it…

I am sort of struggling to understand the manifestation of this issue.  Are there really only 17 people in the world who (A) have m1 macs, (B) play minecraft, and (C) can figure out how to log in to this bug tracker? Or is this affecting some smaller slice of the population? Yoshimasa's very thorough diagnostic description implies that this is in fact completely broken for everyone, but the traffic here seems surprisingly low for that fact.

I think the Launcher is indeed broken for everyone. I don't think that it has something to do with the new M1 chips, but with macOS Monterey and its security features. (Although it is not a Monterey bug, the Launcher is just programmed "wrong".)

I suspect that the other Mac users who experience this issue a) don't want to create an account for the bug tracker, b) think that the issue will be resolved because this thread already exists or c) use another Launcher which is not affected by the bug.

Also, there are (were) 6 duplicate reports for this exact bug. 

Also encountering this problem and hoping it will be fixed soon!

I'm running MacOS Monterey on an M1 Macbook Air. I tried to download the Minecraft Launcher for the first time yesterday and ran into this issue.

Because I haven't run Minecraft on this computer before, the known workarounds don't work for me.

Just wanted to chime in to let people know that another user is affected by this bug (responding to @glyph's accurate observation that surprisingly few people are talking about this).

In addition to @falsemu comment - I have same issues on Monterey, but with Intel CPU.

Thanks for confirming that it's Monterey and not M1, I thought it was working on my Intel machine before I migrated, but I guess Monterey hit around the same time.

Nothing to do for it except keep yammering away here in the hopes that Microsoft notices the activity and actually fixes the bug? 🙂

I also have the same issue with M1 Macbook Air. For now, I am just using MultiMC which works perfectly.

I had the same issue as well. I tried the suggested workarounds to no avail.

So I just used the CurseForge app instead which has a copy of the Minecraft launcher that works perfectly and because it's the vanilla launcher you can make your own profiles for it like Fabric or plain vanilla Minecraft.

The main difference between the Minecraft launcher of Forge and the stand-alone launcher is where the files are stored. In my case, Forge files are stored in my documents folder for easy access. I tried using MultiMC but found that CurseForge was just more intuitive. 

I just saw this on Twitter: https://twitter.com/slicedlime/status/1469150993527017483

> A critical security issue has been found that affects Minecraft. If you have the game running, please shut down all running instances of the game and Launcher and restart - your Launcher will automatically download the fix.

For those of us who have been using --skipUpdate as a workaround, is there any safe way for us to run Minecraft?

@Lucas Garron I believe skipUpdate is only for launcher, which is not JVM application, not Minecraft app itself which is JVM application, so still after launcher launched, and I think it cab download newer version.
But this severe log4j 0-day is mostly for much critical for Minecraft server I think for the client, it's probably more difficult to inject something in the log? – well, anyways, I hope just the launcher get fixed quickly and works without patching to workaround the issue.

I realize the Minecraft team is probably frantically patching everything for the log4j issue right now, but that is case in point about why this issue, which prevents launcher updates, needs to get addressed ASAP.

For all those wondering, the log4j does not affect this, once you do the skip update your lanucher will still update your game files, so you can still get all the update versions of Minecraft that fix the bug.

Sorry, I didn’t mean to suggest that the log4j issue specifically involves this bug, just that it highlights the need to be able to update conveniently and quickly to avoid large numbers of users being stuck on an old version of something. The “something” in this case is the launcher itself, which has a very different attack surface than the game itself, but given that its job is to download and execute code, arguably a somewhat more concerning attack surface in general.

Although, now that I think about it, this probably does worsen the log4j scenario just a bit, although not for anyone reading this comment. Users who haven’t come across this exact bug might launch minecraft directly from the jar file as long as the launcher appears to be completely broken (it’s not obvious how to start it without updating, after all), skipping any automatic upgrades and sticking with old, vulnerable versions of the jar files in question.

In any case this really needs to be fixed soon.

When I download a fresh copy of the launcher and start it with `–skipUpdate`, it immediately tells me that there's a new version available, which suggests to me that there is actually a newer version of the mac launcher that isn't available as an omnibus download. Does anyone have a VM from an older version of macOS that they can patch and copy over the patched version from? I'm wondering if this has been fixed under some other topic but hasn't been properly released.

u can use multimc

i have the launcher the updated one but it exceeds the 10 MB limit

i uploaded the file to google drive download it here https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wzinxn6jPAe6SVBHD7AgJkoGF2vrqkTV/view?usp=sharing

Good news! This report now has a ADO-number "meaning the launcher developers are tracking the issue internally" (quoted from Helper markderickson on another bug report).

So this report seems to make progress! Keep writing comments though, so that the developers know that this is still a serious issue which needs fixing.

Please don't add any comments if you don't have anything new to add to the bug report. If you want to say that you're affected as well, please use the "vote" function on the right of this page to vote for this bug report. This allows us to have all important information concisely in this comments section. Thank you!

How does one request a refund for false advertising , I've purchased Minecraft 4 times thanks to Microsofts damn greediness. Now I bought again only to find out Ive been lied to about the compatibility of my Mac.  Thx for any help getting pointed in the right direction, I would like to request a refund through whoever took my money Microsoft Mojang who knows before I report fraud on my credit card. 

@Teglin I understand your frustration. In the meantime, workaround #2 above works consistently. If you type that command in an app, select it, and then drag that to your Desktop (or elsewhere in the Finder) you can even save it as a 'text clipping', which can later be dragged into a Terminal window to save having to remember it.

I of course tried that already, unfortunately this is a new Mac with a newly purchased Minecraft that is suppose to work on Mac. So as it says, it does not work for me. Only works if you've had Minecraft previously on your Mac. I have the switch version windows version xbox version pc version but this is my 1st Mac. I understand my M1 Mac is new and its a new os but weeks???

For anyone using the CLI method to launch the game, I've found that if I need to restart the app it doesn't work. The following is another bug/solution that will get you up and running if you need to restart the launcher:

MCL-17399

M1 Mac here, It doesn't look like the open from terminal workaround is working for me:

Couldn't load launcher core from '/Users/****/Library/Application Support/minecraft/launcher/launcher.bundle': LoadErrorNotPresent

Yeah workarounds don't work for me either cuz Java support said to delete all files and try downloading the game again.. 🙂 (MacOS 12.0.1 here)