Unreal Engine 5.6/5.7 fails to start on Apple M5 + macOS 26

Development Platform & Builds
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1

I’m having a massive Unreal Engine startup failure on Apple Silicon.

System:

  • MacBook with Apple M5

  • macOS 26.4.1

  • Unreal Engine 5.6.1 and 5.7.4

  • Installed through Epic Games Launcher

Issue:

  • Unreal Editor fails during startup.

  • Through Epic Launcher, the editor usually stops around 4–10%.

  • After disabling a massive amount of everything, I got it to reache ~35% before freezing. This happened only once, was not able to reproduce.

  • The issue happens in both UE 5.6 and 5.7.

  • Zen Storage Server errors appear initially, but even after clearing Zen data and services the editor still hangs.

What I already tried:

  • Removed Zen caches and services

  • Killed all Zen/Trace processes

  • Reinstalled UE 5.6 and 5.7

  • Removed Epic/Unreal cache folders

  • Rebooted system

  • Launched editor directly from terminal

  • Used:

    • -log

    • -NoSplash

    • -NoSound

    • -NullRHI

    • -onethread

    • -forcerhibypass

Important observation:
Launching from terminal with:
“/Users/Shared/Epic Games/UE_5.6/Engine/Binaries/Mac/UnrealEditor.app/Contents/MacOS/UnrealEditor” -NoSplash -NoSound -NullRHI -log" gets significantly further than launching through Epic Games Launcher.

Relevant log behavior:

  • Unreal Trace Server launches successfully

  • Plugins mount successfully

  • Engine reaches:
    “LogInit: Object subsystem initialized”

After that, startup eventually stalls/freezes.

Anyone has had the same issue? Anyone have solutions? I can provide full logs if needed.

Thank you!

2

Finally got it to work. Sharing the fix here as well:

So my mac has multiple users on it. One of the users has an anti-virus software installed. When I opened Unreal Editor on that specific user, I was able to disable the anti-virus software (or more I just allowed it to recognize Unreal and Epic Launcher as safe). This made me bypass the first hurdle, and I got past the 10% problem!

But I ended up getting another issue. Something is wrong with the IOS SDK or similar, and it doesn’t work on these new macOS systems, so it crashed when I wanted to open the Editor normally. This had a simply fix really, just opening through terminal with all Plugins disabled, such as “/Users/MY_USER_NAME/UE_5.7/Engine/Binaries/Mac/UnrealEditor.app/Contents/MacOS/UnrealEditor” -DisableAllPlugins"

I still couldn’t open through Epic Games Launcher, so I had to disable all plugins involving IOS through Terminal. Now everything works, even through EGL.

If someone has similar issues I’m happy to help and explain everything I tried more thoroughly.

3

Hello there,

So, I don’t know if my issue has something to do with yours, but I’m also on Mac and I also have troubles with UE 5.6 and 5.7

My rig is:

iMacPro Intel 3.2 GHz Intel Xeon W 8 cores
Mac OS Sonoma 14.8.4

Unreal Engine 5.5 works just fine.

My issues:

  • with UE 5.6, the engine starts and the shaders load, but UE crashes just before getting to My Projects/New Project window
  • with UE 5.7, the engine can’t even cache the shaders. It usually stops at around 35% and then hangs forever

Tried both engines, it always crashes. Uninstalled, installed 5.5 again, it works just fine again.
For now, I believe I can live with 5.5, but I’m pretty sure I’d love to upgrade sooner or later :smiley:

If anybody has any idea, thanks in advance!