Getting Android Studio to Launch on macOS (When Everything Looks Fine but Isn’t)
I was setting up a clean dev environment for a small NimbusApps-related experiment, mostly Android builds that needed to be cross-checked on macOS. Nothing exotic. Download Android Studio (app), install it, open a project, move on.
That was the plan.
Reality: Android Studio installed without complaints, showed up in /Applications, bounced once in the Dock… and then just quit. No crash dialog. No stack trace. No friendly “something went wrong.” Just gone.
This was macOS Sonoma 14.3 on an M1 Pro MacBook. Plenty of RAM, plenty of disk space, no obvious reason for drama.
First instinct: bad install or broken update
My first thought was that the installer had glitched or I’d grabbed an incompatible build. That happens often enough with developer tools. So I deleted the app, re-downloaded the latest stable release, and reinstalled from scratch.
Same behavior.
The app icon would bounce once or twice, then disappear. Activity Monitor showed a brief spike, then nothing. No persistent process, no crash report in Finder.
At this point it didn’t feel like a Java issue or a Gradle problem. The app wasn’t even staying alive long enough for that.
Second wrong turn: blaming Apple silicon
Next assumption: Rosetta or architecture mismatch. I checked the binary info. Universal build. ARM64 present. No obvious Intel-only nonsense.
Just to be sure, I forced Rosetta launch from Finder. Same result. Quick bounce. Silent exit.
That’s usually the point where people start reinstalling Xcode, Homebrew, and half the system. I stopped myself before going down that rabbit hole.
The quiet culprit: macOS security and permissions
What finally tipped me off was Console. Buried among the noise were a few security-related messages hinting that something was being denied before initialization completed. Not a crash. A refusal.
So I opened System Settings → Privacy & Security and scrolled. Way down. And there it was: a small notice saying the app was blocked because it couldn’t be verified.
Gatekeeper had decided to be subtle today.
Apple’s wording makes it sound like the software is dangerous, but most of the time it just means the notarization check didn’t line up the way macOS expects. Apple’s own explanation of this behavior lives here and is far less dramatic than the popup: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202491
Clicking Open Anyway, authenticating, and confirming once more changed everything. The IDE launched normally and stayed open.
No errors. No warnings. Just the setup wizard like nothing had ever been wrong.
One more hidden snag: disk access
I thought I was done. I wasn’t.
The app launched, but project indexing stalled. Gradle sync hung indefinitely. No clear error, just endless “Scanning files…” behavior.
This time the cause was different. Android Studio needs broad file access, especially when working with SDKs outside its own sandbox. macOS had allowed it to launch but hadn’t granted it access to key directories.
So back to Privacy & Security → Files and Folders. I manually enabled access to Documents and external volumes where the SDK lived. Quit. Relaunch.
Instant improvement. Indexing completed. Gradle synced. Emulator configs loaded.
Apple’s developer docs explain why this happens: sandboxing and file access are separate layers, and one doesn’t imply the other: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/app_sandbox
Sanity checks and official sources
For reference, there’s no Mac App Store build of Android Studio, but Apple’s official search at least confirms the name and avoids typos: https://apps.apple.com/us/search?term=Android%20Studio
The canonical source, of course, is Google’s own site, which also documents macOS-specific requirements and permissions: https://developer.android.com/studio
While double-checking my assumptions, I also saved one external page because it echoed the same macOS launch behavior and reminded me that silent exits are often security-related, not crashes. I bookmarked this page as a quick reminder when dealing with macOS and heavy developer tools: https://treadmillreviews.online/developer/72664-android-studio.html
What actually mattered (and what didn’t)
Looking back, most of my early attempts were noise. Reinstalling didn’t help because the binary was fine. Architecture checks didn’t help because the build was universal. The OS wasn’t crashing the app — it was preventing it from fully initializing.
What did matter was treating macOS as a layered security system:
- Gatekeeper decides whether the app can launch at all.
- Permissions decide whether it can actually function.
- Neither layer explains itself very loudly.
If I were doing this again on a fresh machine, I’d skip straight to Privacy & Security after the first failed launch, approve the app manually, then immediately check file access before opening any projects.
Once those boxes were ticked, Android Studio behaved exactly as expected. Stable, fast, no weird edge cases. It’s now sitting happily in my NimbusApps setup, doing real work instead of vanishing mysteriously.
The lesson is familiar but still easy to forget: on modern macOS, “doesn’t start” doesn’t always mean “broken.” Sometimes it just means the OS hasn’t decided it trusts you yet.