First things first, please, no “Mac vs PC” debates. Ludum Dare might be the only gaming community where I haven’t endured a “PC Master Race” flame war, it’d be nice if we could keep it that way.

Now that that is out of the way, I wanted to bring up a reoccurring issue that Mac-using participants have had to deal with in the past few Ludum Dares, the dreaded and cryptic "The Application can't be opened" error.

This was an issue with macOS Catalina that I believe is still present in macOS Big Sur. The actual cause is the app become corrupt when it's uploaded/downloaded in a .zip file, particularly from itch.io

I know the cause, a fix for players that download apps with this error, and preventative measures uploads can take before distributing.

If you're a developer sharing your game, be sure to place your .app file inside a .dmg file before uploading. Even if the .dmg is inside a .zip file, the .app file will still be protected. Your players should not have any issues.

For Mac users who’ve downloaded an already-corrupted .app, you’ll need to do a bit of Terminal maintenance. Right-click the .app, navigate to /Contents/MacOS, and find the single Unix executable file. Open a terminal window and type in “chmod +x “, then drag in the Unix executable. You should wind up something that looks like this: chmod +x /Users/UserName/Downloads/GameName.app/Contents/MacOS/GameName Hit enter, you should see the icon change, and your .app should be good to go!