Troubleshooting

The app won't open

"Apple cannot check it for malicious software." Expected — MacGet is not notarized. See first launch.

It bounces in the Dock and quits. Almost always a macOS version below Tahoe 26.4. Check → About This Mac.

Downloads are slower than expected

Check the connection count before the thread setting. If a download is running at 2 connections despite a setting of 16, the host imposed that — see adaptive concurrency. That's the engine protecting the download, not a bug.

A previously learned cap may be stale. Caps only ratchet downward, so a host that has since loosened its limits will still be treated conservatively. Quit MacGet and delete ~/Library/Application Support/Macget/host_caps.json to make it rediscover.

Check the speed limit. A global cap in Settings applies to all downloads combined, not per download.

More threads is usually not the answer. Raising thread count and concurrent downloads together multiplies open connections, which most CDNs treat as abuse.

A download won't resume

The remote file changed. MacGet sends If-Range with the original validator. If the server says the file changed, resuming safely is impossible and MacGet restarts once from scratch. See resume semantics.

The server doesn't support ranges. Nothing to resume from; the download restarts. The original probe records this.

The partial file was deleted or moved. Progress is tracked against a specific partial file. Without it, the download starts over.

Downloads fail immediately

Some failures are deliberately not retried, because retrying makes things worse: 401, 403, 404, 410, 451, range refusals, and malformed responses fail fast.

A 403 on a URL that works in your browser usually means the link is session-bound or referrer-checked. Use the browser extension, which carries the cookies and referrer across.

The browser extension isn't capturing

1. Confirm Settings → Browser integration is on in MacGet.
2. Confirm MacGet has launched at least once since you last moved the app — the native-messaging host path is stamped at launch.
3. On Chromium, confirm the extension ID is ldmhmgglgemkoogpokfcgplbpfokcejl (Chrome Web Store) or knccbiljmilfmhfellkfbdmilpbdkgni (unpacked clone). Any other ID is refused by design.
4. On Firefox, remember temporary add-ons don't survive a browser restart.

If capture fails, the browser downloads the file normally — the handoff is only finalised after MacGet acknowledges it.

Media downloads fail

Media extraction is off by default. Turn it on in Settings → Media.

The site changed its player. Extractors break when sites change. yt-dlp is bundled, so the fix arrives with a MacGet update.

DRM-protected content will not download. MacGet makes no attempt to circumvent DRM.

The disk filled up

MacGet refuses a download whose total size exceeds 95% of free space, and re-checks during the download — pausing cleanly if the volume fills from elsewhere. Free space and resume the download.

Remember that partial files are allocated at full size. They're sparse on APFS, so they don't consume it all at once, but the space will be needed eventually.

Seeing what's actually happening

Right-click a download and choose Copy Diagnostics for per-chunk attempts, errors, and live concurrency state. That's usually enough to tell a host problem from a MacGet problem.

For live engine logs:

log stream --predicate 'subsystem == "com.macget"' --level debug

Still broken

Open an issue with the diagnostics output and what you expected. For anything security-related, please follow the security policy instead of filing publicly.