I suspect you have several Anki versions installed in your computer, one of which is in /Applications/, one of which is in /Users/whatever/Applications/. From now on, only speculation, because I’ve never used a Mac in my life so I don’t really know how it works (but it should comply to some extent to the unix logic, so it’s enlightened speculation): the version installed in /Applications/ is the latest compatible version, installed system-wide. Everyone can launch it, and it works fine, that’s why when you start it with the admin account, everything works. On the other hand, the version installed in /Users/whatever/Applications/ is an incompatible one, installed only for the user whatever. Even though both versions are available from whatever‘s standpoint, just launching Anki will select the version in /Users/whatever/Applications/ because it comes first in the users’ PATH (which is logic: if there is an application installed system-wide, but, as a user, I still install an other version, it means I am interested in the latter, not the former). If this is correct, typing /Applications/Anki.app in a terminal as a user should work.
Also, I don’t know how you understood that Anki was running fine as an admin, but I suspect you “just tried what would happen if I ran that app as an admin”. If that’s the case, I would highly suggest you not doing that anymore, as it can be very dangerous. All debugging should be possible without granting admin access to the app that is not working.
I ran into the same issue and found a workaround, if you’re comfortable using the command line.
I describe it in on GitHub as issue 1934 but I can’t post the issue link here.
I also describe a workaround that worked for me. If you go to the command line, and do the following, it will modify the Anki bundle’s files’ user group to “staff”:
cd /Applications
sudo chgrp -R staff Anki.app/
But I make no guarantees and I would not recommend you to execute these commands unless they make sense to you.
I am seeing the same problem on 2.1.54 Qt6 on an Intel Mac running Catalina (10.15.7). Algal’s solution confirms what I suspect, that is, the problem is a permissions issue. I noticed that /Applications/Anki.app/Contents/MacOS/anki has the permissions
-rwxr-x—@
These UNIX permissions mean that the “others” cannot execute the application. I normally use a separate administrator account from my own user account to install applications, giving different permissions for that administrator account than my own standard account. I first noticed this problem in 2.1.52. I tried to increase the permissions only on the anki executable, but it still did not work. I thought that the permissions likely were incorrect elsewhere in the bundle. Algal’s solution likely worked because he changed the group permissions of Anki.app to a group of which he is a member.
Since I usually am the only Anki user on this computer, rather than trying to correct the downloaded bundle’s permissions issue, I just installed Anki.app into the /Applications folder from my own account. While this fix satisfies my needs for now, the permissions need to be fixed in the distributed bundle. I had hoped that this issue would be caught by the developer without my needing to submit a bug report, but two releases later the bug still is there. Thank you auntanki for creating this thread.
