Anki crashes immediately when opening

Anki Help
1

When I open Anki, it crashes immediately before a windows appears. I’ve tried restarting my pc, starting up anki while holding shift and updated anki to latest version. I haven’t added a new addon or such since the last time Anki worked. I am using MacOS.

2

What is the output if you run anki from the terminal? Send as text in a code block please.

1 Like
3

After running /Applications/Anki.app/Contents/MacOS/launcher in terminal:

Starting Anki 25.09.2…
2026-03-22 12:24:56,214:INFO:aqt.mediasrv: Serving on ``http://127.0.0.1:49577
Qt fatal: The following paths were searched for Qt WebEngine Process:
/Users/User1/Library/Application Support/AnkiProgramFiles/.venv/lib/python3.13/site-packages/PyQt6/Qt6/lib/QtWebEngineCore.framework/Helpers/QtWebEngineProcess.app/Contents/MacOS/QtWebEngineProcess
/Users/User1/Library/Application Support/AnkiProgramFiles/python/cpython-3.13.5-macos-aarch64-none/bin/QtWebEngineProcess
but could not find it.
You may override the default search path by using QTWEBENGINEPROCESS_PATH environment variable.
zsh: abort /Applications/Anki.app/Contents/MacOS/launcher

4
  • Are you saying that you’ve been using Anki regularly, it had been working just fine, but it suddenly started having this problem?
  • Or, did you previously use Anki in the distant past, perhaps using an older version, but then tried again recently and started encountering problems?
  • Or, did you previously use Anki in the past, updated to the latest version, and then started having problems only after the update?

Anki is looking for the QtWebEngineProcess binary file. On your system it seems to be missing or unreachable. However, on my Mac I found the binary in the first listed path:

% pwd
/Users/myusername/Library/Application Support/AnkiProgramFiles/.venv/lib/python3.13/site-packages/PyQt6/Qt6/lib/QtWebEngineCore.framework/Helpers/QtWebEngineProcess.app/Contents/MacOS

% ls -l
total 168
-rwxr-xr-x@ 1 myusername staff 85872 Jul 23 2025 QtWebEngineProcess

% file QtWebEngineProcess
QtWebEngineProcess: Mach-O 64-bit executable arm64

The same file should exist in the similar path on your system. If you are able to, in the Terminal app you might want to try going down the path to see if the file exists or if you encounter a problem along the way.

Or, perhaps the problem is that somehow all the Anki files weren’t fully installed and set up on your system? Deleting the /Users/User1/Library/Application Support/AnkiProgramFiles directory would delete the Anki installation, allowing the Anki Launcher to re-install Anki from scratch the next time it is run.

3 Likes
5

Thanks, that file was indeed missing on my mac. I deleted AnkiProgramFiles and was able to reinstall anki.

Yes, anki was working fine before and suddenly had this problem. But I think I may know what might have caused it.

1 Like
6

Sharing what you figured out can help other users avoid the problem.

1 Like