I’m encountering the same issue, but I can’t open Anki at all due to this. Removing then reinstalling does not resolve the issue. Whenever I open Anki.app, my machine asks for permission to open “launcher”, which just opens an empty terminal when I click OK.
Would you mind recording a short video of what you’re seeing, then posting it somewhere like imgur.com? If you remove the AnkiProgramFiles folder, does that make a difference?
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Thanks, dae. I uploaded a video to imgur. Compression is unfortunately really high, but you should still be able to view what’s going on. I’m not allowed to post links, but the unique imgur ID is: 6MKiC9x
Removing the ankiprogramfiles folder does not change anything. Still same as in the video.
The terminal window that is visble in the video is just the brew info information and shows as follows:
brew info anki
==> **anki**: 25.02.6
https://apps.ankiweb.net/
Installed
/opt/homebrew/Caskroom/anki/25.07.4 (74MB)
Installed using the formulae.brew.sh API on 2025-07-24 at 21:56:54
From: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-cask/blob/HEAD/Casks/a/anki.rb
==> **Name**
Anki
==> **Description**
Memory training application
==> **Artifacts**
Anki.app (App)
==> **Analytics**
install: 1,307 (30 days), 3,602 (90 days), 12,119 (365 days)
Would you be able to include the full imgur link in backticks? I’m having trouble locating the image.
Didn’t think of that. Here it is
https://imgur.com/a/6MKiC9x
I should add that my default shell is fish. Now realising this might be relevant, yet at the same time I do not see any failed commands having run on the terminal that opens.
edit: manually starting the “launcher” command from the terminal (with fish shell) starts it succesfully. It starts downloading all it needs and I can open Anki.app thereafter.
Though the fact that the command does not run when launching Anki from the Applications folder suggests something might still be broken in the distribution (through homebrew specifically maybe?).
I tried installing fish and using ‘sudo chsh’ to change my default shell. It didn’t seem to trigger this behaviour. Did you make the default some other way?
I noticed in your screencast that the security pop-up talks about a “UNIX app”. It shouldn’t do that normally, and it makes me wonder whether Homebrew’s package was damaged in some one. If you uninstall it and install Anki directly from GitHub, what happens?
To set fish as my default shell, I have changed the Terminal Settings. Under General there is an option to set either the default login shell or to enter the command/path that should open. I have changed this option “Shells open with:” to /opt/homebrew/bin/fish.
I did also download Anki from https://apps.ankiweb.net and installed this (after uninstalling it from homebrew), but encountered the same process. Opening Anki.app got me the same message about “launcher” wanting to open.
Thanks, I was able to reproduce the problem. It seems like it’s something non-standard in fish when set that way, and I couldn’t figure out a workaround on Anki’s end. Setting a different shell in that section doesn’t break ‘open -a Terminal /path/to/cli/command’, and changing the default shell to fish instead of changing that setting doesn’t break things either.
Thanks dae, for figuring that out. Even if not changing anything, the workaround is just to manually run the “launcher” command inside Anki after installing (and maybe after upgrading?). Did a cursory search in the fish docs to see if anything might interfere / work differently from bash/zsh, but I’m not really seeing anything. https://fishshell.com/docs/current/fish_for_bash_users.html
I’m in a tiny minority anyway probably. Happy to know using fish is the issue here.
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