I’ve been using Anki for years on both desktop and mobile without any issues. However, after getting a new MacBook Air this week and transferring all my data from my old Mac, I can no longer open Anki on my desktop.
Initially, I tried launching the transferred version of Anki that came over from my old computer, but it would not open. I then tried downloading a fresh copy directly from the Anki website.
I downloaded the macOS 12+ version successfully, saved it to my Downloads folder, opened the installer, and dragged Anki into my Applications folder as instructed. However, when I try to launch the app, the icon only bounces once in the Dock and then immediately stops. The app never actually opens, and there’s no error message.
I’ve tried reinstalling multiple times with the same result. I also found an older forum post describing a similar issue and followed the suggested troubleshooting steps, including copy/pasting commands into Terminal, but that did not resolve the problem either.
Any suggestions or troubleshooting tips would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance for the help!
Your old Mac had an Intel CPU and your new MacBook Air is Apple Silicon, correct?
Please run the Anki launcher via the /Applications/Anki.app/Contents/MacOS/launcher command in the Terminal app. Doing so will allow you to view any error messages that might get printed.
However, if you know for a fact that the Anki previously installed on your system is intended for Intel-CPU Macs and is now wrong for your Apple Silicon Mac, it is likely that you’ll want to delete the current Anki installation (the ~/Library/Application Support/AnkiProgramFiles directory) and then re-download/re-install Anki to get the version that runs on Apple Silicon. (Your decks, media files, study history, etc. are in a different directory and will not be affected by deleting the AnkiProgramFiles directory. Please see the documentation for more information about the different places user files and program files are stored.)
If you continue to have issues, please provide the error messages you see when running the launcher from the Terminal app.
Another alternative you might want to consider trying would be installing the Anki 26.05 Beta 1 being tested right now. It uses a different installer (a regular .dmg file). I suspect that installing Anki this way would replace the old Anki installation with the new one, fixing the problem of having an incorrect, old version of Anki. However, I’m not sure about this, and that particular situation/scenario hasn’t yet been tested.
Yes, it should be as simple as replacing Anki.app. The old AnkiProgramFiles will be left around but won’t have any effect on the new installation as everything needed to run the app is contained in the bundle.
We’re planning to release it as stable in a few weeks.