Crashes in Epic Games Launcher refer to libtbb.dylib

Development Platform & Builds Mobile
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I got consistently repeatable crashes reported when I ran the Epic Games Launcher. Configuration is:

  • Mac M3
  • Unreal Engine 5.6.1

The symptoms would be:

  • launch from the Mac via eg double click in Applications folder, or cmd-space
  • Crash dialog displayed with message about libtbb.dylib not being found

This library is in fact present in the Epic Games Launcher application:

~ $ find /Applications/Epic\ Games\ Launcher.app/ -name "*libtbb*"
/Applications/Epic Games Launcher.app/Contents/UE/Engine/Binaries/Mac/UnrealEditorServices.app/Contents/MacOS/libtbbmalloc.dylib
/Applications/Epic Games Launcher.app/Contents/UE/Engine/Binaries/Mac/UnrealEditorServices.app/Contents/MacOS/libtbb.dylib
/Applications/Epic Games Launcher.app/Contents/UE/Engine/Binaries/ThirdParty/Intel/TBB/Mac/libtbbmalloc.dylib
/Applications/Epic Games Launcher.app/Contents/UE/Engine/Binaries/ThirdParty/Intel/TBB/Mac/libtbb.dylib

Weirdly the Launcher would in fact start, it was just obscured by the crash dialog. It is very annoying because I don’t use the launcher a lot and I’d forget that this spurious crash thing was going to pop up.

I found a fix:

rm -Rf \~/Library/Services/UE4EditorServices.app
rm -Rf \~/Library/Services/UnrealEditorServices.app/

I inspected the trace in the crash dialog and noticed that amongst the rpath that it was searching was these old UE4 paths - I believe at one point the launcher was written in UE4. Maybe still is.

With those gone, Epic Games Launcher starts up without any problem.

Hope it helps someone.