How to fix Messages app closing after macOS Sequoia 15.4 update?

I have also found that clicking a completely random link in Safari will cause it to crash, with the "Safari Crashed" dialog box. Before 15.4 I can't recall Safari EVER crashing for any reason on Sequoia or earlier. I did check memory pressure and it's fine. 15.4 is a bodged update for sure. And Messages is still crashing as before- no change.

Same issue here on my M1 iMac. I don't know if this is helpful or not but I find it interesting Messages does not quit on its own when my computer is sleeping. I woke it up this morning after about fourteen hours and Messages was still running. It seems to only spontaneously quit while I'm doing other things on the iMac.

Also, is it just me or is anyone else's Weather app doing the exact same thing?

Same here on an M4 Pro 24GB - happens with Home, Mona (Mastodon client), and Tapestry so far. It's been happening fairly regularly, and I finally decided that there was no way I was accidentally hitting Cmd-Q this often, so I decided to search and see if it's common and found myself here.

Glad I found this thread. I thought I was losing my mind or something was uniquely wrong with my Mac. So frustrating. I'm having the exact same behaviour. At first I thought it was Quitter as I had just started using it, but this was set to hide messages after a 10 minute delay, not quit. The behaviour also persisted even after quitting Quitter.

This is clearly a bug that hopefully can be addressed in 15.5 (or even earlier). I also submitted feedback with a link to this thread.

I had the same problem since updating to 15.4. Upgrading to 15.4.1 did not solve the problem immediately. However, I added message app to allow "Full Disk Access" under Privacy & Security. Since then, message app has been running without closing!

I had seen that 15.4.1 didn't seem to fix the issue, but my MacBook Pro didn't shut anything down automatically for at least a couple days after I installed the update. Then, suddenly, I came back to it after a couple hours yesterday afternoon and it had shut down Mona, Tapestry, and Messages while I was away (so, that's one Apple app, one 3rd party Mac app, and one iPad app).

Also, to clarify: the apps in question are not "crashing" (there is no "XXX shut down unexpectedly" message), they're being shut down automatically by macOS in much the same way that iOS/iPadOS automatically shut down apps to preserve RAM or battery. However, this is new behavior in macOS 15.4 - I haven't seen macOS automatically managing system load by shutting apps down previously, though Apple has been preparing to possibly enable it for some time (by allowing you to turn off the indicator for running apps in the Dock). Like many here, I keep a lot of apps open (I use Mission Control/Spaces pretty heavily), but if you turn off that running apps indicator and usually use one app at a time via the Dock, you might never notice this happening.

Ironically, this is kind of a variation on the bad habit some people have of force quitting apps on iOS/iPadOS to "preserve their battery", which just causes a heavier battery hit when the apps are restarted from scratch every time. In this case, though, it's macOS shutting apps down on devices that generally have more resources than mobile devices, and might even be plugged in.

Finally, if apps are immediately shutting down when you try to open them or your entire OS crashed, you're dealing with a different problem.

AdminVDS1 wrote:

Since updating to 15.4 my messages ap and Podcast app on my mac just shut down. They don't appear to crash since I don't receive a pop up stating the app has crashed. I don't appear to be having issues with any other apps. Suggestions on how to repair or fix?

Couple things— you can try launching the app while holding the Shift key down, and compare your results...

no change try a SafeBoot Start up your Mac in safe mode - Apple Support to sort anomalies

Login and test. Reboot as normal and test. Caches get rebuilt automatically.

15.4.1 did not fix this

I'm seeing exactly the same issue since I upgraded to 15.4. Podcasts app just closes randomly, no crash message, nothing in Console logs.

I'd add the Overcast and Kindle apps are also "quietly" closing/crashing since 15.4 was installed.

I'm experiencing on my M4 MBP, so this annoying bug isn't isolated to the M1 and M2.

As I've been assessing this bug Apple introduced with MacOS 15.4, I'm noticing that whenever a new message is received, it crashes/closes the Messages app on my Mac Studio M1.

Safe mode reboot doesn't help

No magic

FWIW, and just in case this info is helpful to anyone, I've determined that the Messages app being closed does not prevent messages that are set to be sent later from going out.