After Effects 26.3.0 aborts at startup on macOS 26.6.2 (Apple Silicon) — 26.2.1 works, 53/53 launches failed

# After Effects 26.3.0 aborts at startup on macOS 26.6.2 (Apple Silicon) — 26.2.1 works, 53/53 launches failed

**Workaround, for anyone stuck: roll back to 26.2.1.**
Creative Cloud → After Effects → **⋯** → **Other versions** → 26.2.1. Running fine here after 53 consecutive failed launches on 26.3.0. A full uninstall/reinstall of the Creative Cloud suite is *not* needed.

**This is not the "After Effects freezes before the splash screen" issue.** Those reports describe a hung process — beachball, "not responding" in Force Quit. Here the process is never hung: it stays responsive, puts up an error dialog, and **exits cleanly with status 0** after a few seconds. Different failure, so I'm filing separately rather than adding noise to that thread.

---

## System

| | |
|---|---|
| Machine | Mac mini (Macmini9,1), Apple M1, 16 GB |
| macOS | 26.6.2 (build 25G83) |
| Display | Samsung C49HG9x, 3840 × 1080 @ 120 Hz |
| Broken | After Effects **26.3.0** (build 26.3.0.87) |
| Working | After Effects **26.2.1** (build 26.2.1.2) |
| Same machine | Premiere Pro 2026 launches and runs normally throughout |

## Symptom

Every launch shows the **Crash Repair Options** dialog ("We detected a crash during your last session…"). Whichever button is chosen — **including Start in Safe Mode** — After Effects then shows:

> After Effects can't continue: unexpected failure during application startup.
> Check that you have appropriate permissions to launch After Effects and read/write access to the After Effects preferences folder.

and quits. 26.3.0 never once reached the UI on this machine.

## The important part: this is not a crash, it is a deliberate abort

I think this is why these reports go nowhere — **no crash report is generated anywhere**, so users have nothing to attach:

- No Apple crash report (`.ips`) is ever produced
- No Crashpad/Sentry minidump — `~/Library/Caches/Adobe/After Effects/26.0/SentryIO-db/{completed,pending,new}` stay empty
- Running the binary directly from Terminal gives **exit code 0 and entirely empty stderr**

After Effects calls its own error reporter and exits. Backtrace from the unified system log (`sudo log show --last 20m --style compact`, filtered on `NSCGS`), captured as the error dialog is built:

```
33  After Effects  main + 6452
32  AfterFXLib     EggMain(...)
31  AfterFXLib     MainMain(...)
30  AfterFXLib     CEggApp::CEggApp(aelib::InitIterator&, bool, bool,
                                    boost::shared_ptr<StartupTimeTelemetry>) + 3032
29  U.dylib        U_ReportError(unsigned int, unsigned short, std::basic_string<...> const&)
28  U.dylib        Up_Report16(unsigned int, unsigned short, ..., bool)
27  U.dylib        Up_ReportErrorUTF16(...)
26  U.dylib        Up_ReportErrorDialog(...)
25  dvaui          dvaui::dialogs::messagebox::Messagebox(...)
24  dvaui          dvaui::dialogs::UI_MessageBox::RunModal()
```

A condition inside the `CEggApp` constructor at offset **+3032** fails, `U_ReportError` is called with an error code, the app aborts. **That error code is the one thing users cannot see** — the dialog only ever shows the generic wording above.

## Where initialization stops

The Sentry breadcrumb `initializer` tag lists the initializers that completed. It ends at the same point on every launch:

```
… CodecSupport::ProResCodec.  CodecSupport::ArriRawCodec.  CodecSupport::CanonRawCodec.  drawbotagm.
```

`drawbotagm` — the graphics/AGM layer — is the last to complete. Possibly relevant given the separate reports of Metal/GPU regressions on macOS Tahoe 26.6.

## Reproducibility

`~/Library/Preferences/com.Adobe.After Effects.plist` → `AppStates` logs every session with `source.version`, `SessionDuration` and `AppState`:

- **26.3.0.87 — 53 sessions, 0 clean.** All `AppState = 1000`, durations 2–256 s
- **26.2.1.2 — normal sessions**

100 % reproducible: reinstalling 26.3 brings it straight back.

## Ruled out (each tested separately)

- **Safe Mode** — same failure. Worth noting for other threads: Safe Mode does **not** disable MediaCore importers, so it is a weaker test than it appears
- **Preferences** — reset with Cmd+Opt+Shift, and separately by launching with `env HOME=/tmp/empty` (a completely virgin home folder). Same failure — which also rules out user fonts, caches and every Adobe user-level setting
- **Clean reinstall** of 26.3 — same failure
- **Third-party plug-ins** — `/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Common/Plug-ins/7.0/MediaCore/` emptied (Insta360, Blackmagic RAW). Same failure; `Plugin Loading.log` completes fully regardless
- **Permissions** — account promoted to admin, machine rebooted: same failure. Nothing under the app bundle or `/Library/Application Support/Adobe` is non-world-readable, and the preferences folder is writable (verified by test write)
- **Licensing** — a red herring worth flagging. The alert reports `<NGL> GetAMTData returned NglStatusCode:401 Workflow Required` as the *last log line*, but Acrobat logs the identical `could not reach COPS` / `licensed from cache` pattern on this machine and works fine. Signing out of Creative Cloud and back in changed nothing
- **Fonts** — none added or modified since 2024, none zero-length
- **Metal shader cache** — empty (`DARWIN_USER_CACHE_DIR/com.apple.metal` does not exist)
- **Disk space, RAM, network, SMB mounts** — all healthy

## Ask

If someone can say what `U_ReportError` receives at `CEggApp::CEggApp + 3032`, that pins it down immediately. Happy to run any further diagnostics — it reproduces every time.