This is a recurring issue that started around the time MacOS 26 came out and I’ve been struggling with it ever since. After Effects (and sometimes Illustrator) fail to start. They don’t even get to the splash screen, the freeze before that. They will remain frozen and if you mouse over the control bar at the top, it will show the spinning beach ball. Pressing Cmd +Opt + Escape to open the force quit applications window shows After Effects as not responding.Waiting hours for it to start: No effect. Never starts Force quitting: launches prompts to report the issue to Adobe and Apple. All subsequent attempts to run After Effects get crash repair options but no options do anything. The window has the spinning beach ball when I mouse over it and in Force Quit Applications it shows that After Effects is already not responding. None of the buttons do anything when clicked.Uninstalled After Effects and restarted: no effect, still freezes on crash repair options Uninstalled all adobe apps, and creative cloud with creative cloud uninstaller then restarted, then reinstalled then restarted: no effect, still freezes on crash repair options Reviewed the permissions on all folders identified in this article and found them all to have the appropriate permissions specified https://helpx.adobe.com/in/x-productkb/multi/preferences-folder-read-only-error.html?linkId=100000356112912: Uninstalled all Adobe Apps and creative cloud, restarted. Created a new user account with full permissions. Installed After effects and creative cloud on the new account and restarted: no effect, still freezes on crash repair options Uninstalled all adobe apps and creative cloud and manually removed all files listed here https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1k6ordr/how_to_actually_delete_every_trace_of_adobe_from/ including all wildcard names denoted with * then restarted, then installed adobe CC and After Effects: This is the ONLY thing that allows After Effects to run again. HOWEVER, the issue comes back every few weeks. I’m not sure if it’s related to Adobe auto updates or what. I am going to try disabling all Adobe updates this time to see if that allows it to run longer before it starts hanging on launch again. Has anyone else had this issue? After Effects version: All versions since September 2026MacOS Tahoe 26.2 Apple M2 Max32gb RAM

Participant

Question

After Effects freezes on start before the splash screen

Forum|Forum|23 hours ago
May 6, 2026
3 replies
25 views

This is a recurring issue that started around the time MacOS 26 came out and I’ve been struggling with it ever since. After Effects (and sometimes Illustrator) fail to start. They don’t even get to the splash screen, the freeze before that. They will remain frozen and if you mouse over the control bar at the top, it will show the spinning beach ball. Pressing Cmd +Opt + Escape to open the force quit applications window shows After Effects as not responding.

Waiting hours for it to start: No effect. Never starts
Force quitting: launches prompts to report the issue to Adobe and Apple. All subsequent attempts to run After Effects get crash repair options but no options do anything. The window has the spinning beach ball when I mouse over it and in Force Quit Applications it shows that After Effects is already not responding. None of the buttons do anything when clicked.

Uninstalled After Effects and restarted: no effect, still freezes on crash repair options
Uninstalled all adobe apps, and creative cloud with creative cloud uninstaller then restarted, then reinstalled then restarted: no effect, still freezes on crash repair options
Reviewed the permissions on all folders identified in this article and found them all to have the appropriate permissions specified https://helpx.adobe.com/in/x-productkb/multi/preferences-folder-read-only-error.html?linkId=100000356112912:
Uninstalled all Adobe Apps and creative cloud, restarted. Created a new user account with full permissions. Installed After effects and creative cloud on the new account and restarted: no effect, still freezes on crash repair options
Uninstalled all adobe apps and creative cloud and manually removed all files listed here https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1k6ordr/how_to_actually_delete_every_trace_of_adobe_from/ including all wildcard names denoted with * then restarted, then installed adobe CC and After Effects: This is the ONLY thing that allows After Effects to run again. HOWEVER, the issue comes back every few weeks.

I’m not sure if it’s related to Adobe auto updates or what. I am going to try disabling all Adobe updates this time to see if that allows it to run longer before it starts hanging on launch again.

Has anyone else had this issue?

After Effects version: All versions since September 2026

MacOS Tahoe 26.2

Apple M2 Max

32gb RAM

B

Brian-Maffitt

Community Manager

Would you try navigating to the AE app on your drive, holding down cmd-opt-shift on the Mac (ctrl-alt-shift on PC) then right-click on the app and choose open? You should be presented with the option to start in “safe mode” or with fresh preferences, which might allow you to bypass this crash.

Commander Z3kAuthor

Participant

So it was working once I got through deleting all of the files listed in that reddit post and reinstalled but performing this (navigated to applications/Adobe After Effects 2026> holding down Cmd+Opt+shift> right clicking on Adobe After Effects 2026>selecting “Open” ) actually brought up the same crash repair options where it was hanging before, it hung on that screen again and quit responding. I had to force quit AE and now that it goes to that screen at launch automatically and hangs again. Attempting to open with that keyboard shortcut now that it’s hanging again does not bypass the crash repair options.

We may have narrowed it down to some issue with the startup sequence involving this screen or the screen that asks if you want to migrate preferences after an update where it hung initially before.

Is there a different way to force it to bypass this screen?

Commander Z3kAuthor

Participant

Headway!

I started going through the list of files and folders from Reddit and attempting to launch AE after deleting each one in the list. ( I went kind of backwards because I had started at the top of the list yesterday with no luck. But I deleted all of the ones in bold and italics, ending with \~/Library/Preferences/com.adobe.\*.plist (again including all files where a wildcard * was specified) and it launched again! I didn’t touch any from the system library, just the user library.

•	\~/Library/Application Support/Adobe•	\~/Library/Preferences/com.adobe.\*.plist•	\~/Library/Caches/Adobe•	\~/Library/Caches/com.adobe.\*•	\~/Library/Logs/Adobe•	\~/Library/Cookies/com.adobe.\*•	\~/Library/Saved Application State/com.adobe.\*•	\~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.adobe.\*•	\~/Library/WebKit/com.adobe.\*•	\~/Library/Containers/com.adobe.\*•	\~/Library/Group Containers/com.adobe.\*

ToolfarmJP

Community Expert

Would you try to launch After Effects by typing “sudo open” command on Terminal.app?

Commander Z3kAuthor

Participant

can you be more specific about the full path and command? I am not 100% familiar with terminal commands. I navigated to the Applications folder with cd but it says there is no ‘Adobe After Effects 2026’ folder and when I use ls in the applications folder it only shows Chrome Apps.localized and Edge Apps.localized. When I run sudo open ‘Adobe After Effects 2026’.app that doesn’t work either since the file seems to actually be in a folder called Adobe ‘After Effects 2026’.

Thanks!

K

Kevin-Monahan

Community Manager

Hi Commander Z3K,

Thanks for the post and for all the info you provided. I don't have a direct solution for you as I have not heard of others with this issue. I will let the team know about this unusual situation now. Sorry for the frustration on this one. I hope we can help you.

Thanks,
Kevin

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