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Minecraft Launcher: Unable to update the launcher

14 Sep 2025

tl;dr

The steps I took to debug this:

The whole story

Every few months I feel the urge to play Minecraft on my M1 Macbook Pro. As always the launcher (Minecraft.app) tried a self-update but this time it failed, saying only “Unable to update launcher.” Whenever such things happen, my first step is to download the launcher directly from the website and replace the installed one. To no avail this time. I started googling and found this thread on Reddit which lead to a closed ticket on Majong’s website. None of them offering a true solution to my problem. According to them it’s a “cannot reproduce”.

I started poking around in the Application Support folder at ~/Library/Application\ Support/minecraft/ and found a nativeUpdaterLog.txt with today’s timestamp - perfect! Looking at it, at the very bottom I found these lines:

[Error: 2025-09-14 07:53:10.614556: DBZT1GDIt18=: Updating.cpp(522)] Update failed for: /.../Chromium Embedded Framework, Error: 0x00000001 - generic: Operation not permitted
[Warning: 2025-09-14 07:53:10.615172: DBZT1GDIt18=: main.cpp(106)] Updating core failed with error: 9
[Fatal: 2025-09-14 07:53:12.286743: DBZT1GDIt18=: main.cpp(314)] Updating core failed with error: 9 and not continuing!

Probably some weird permission problem. The Chromium framework is inside the launcher.bundle at ~/Library/Application Support/minecraft/launcher/launcher.bundle/Contents/Frameworks/Chromium Embedded Framework.framework

I decided to the delete the whole bundle and started the Minecraft launcher again. This time the self update succeeded and the launcher came up as expected 🥳

I would have posted this solution to Reddit, but the thread is now archived and locked.

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