Hey — quick note while it’s still fresh in my head. Yesterday evening I went down a small rabbit hole trying to get SDL Ball (game) running on macOS, and it turned into one of those “nothing is crashing, but nothing is happening either” situations. Thought I’d write it up for you in plain human language, because this is exactly the kind of thing that wastes an hour if you don’t know where to look.
So the goal was simple. I wanted to fire up a tiny SDL-based game, mostly out of curiosity and partly to see how it behaves on a clean macOS setup. I’m on a MacBook Air M1, macOS Sonoma 14.3. Downloaded the build, unzipped it, double-clicked… and macOS did its best impression of a polite brick wall.
No error dialog. No “app is damaged” warning. The Dock icon bounced once, maybe twice, and then disappeared. Activity Monitor showed a process for half a second and then nothing. That’s it. Very zen. Very unhelpful.
First instinct was the usual stuff. I re-downloaded the archive, assuming a bad unzip or a half-written binary. Same result. Then I tried launching it from Terminal just to see if it would at least complain there. It didn’t. The binary exited immediately with no output, which is always suspicious but not very actionable.
At this point I briefly blamed SDL itself. I’ve been burned before by missing frameworks or mismatched architectures. I checked with file and confirmed it was a universal binary, not Intel-only. I even ran otool -L to see if it was pointing at something exotic. Everything looked normal. Dead end.
What finally clicked was realizing this wasn’t a crash — it was macOS deciding, very quietly, that the game wasn’t allowed to run. No dialog because Gatekeeper had already made up its mind. This behavior lines up perfectly with how recent macOS versions handle unsigned or unnotarized binaries that don’t explicitly trigger a warning.
Apple documents this, but not in a way that feels obvious when you’re tired. The relevant behavior is described on their Gatekeeper overview and notarization docs over on support.apple.com and developer.apple.com, and once you re-read those, the silence makes sense. The OS is protecting you… silently.
My next attempt was the wrong one. I went straight for the nuclear option and removed the quarantine attribute recursively from the whole folder. That technically worked, but it felt sloppy, and I rolled it back because I wanted to understand the minimal fix instead of bulldozing the problem.
What actually helped was much simpler and more controlled: manually allowing the app once so macOS stops treating it like a stranger. I right-clicked the executable, chose Open, got the “this app is from an unidentified developer” dialog, and explicitly allowed it. After that, the game launched normally every time. Window appeared. SDL initialized. Input worked. No further drama.
Apple even spells this flow out in their own words here:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202491
and the underlying rationale is covered in more detail in the notarization docs on developer.apple.com. Once you read those, the behavior feels less random and more like an overprotective friend.
One more subtle thing I noticed: the first successful launch took noticeably longer. About two seconds of nothing before the window appeared. Subsequent launches were instant. That’s macOS caching the trust decision. If someone reports “it works but only after a weird pause the first time,” this is probably why.
I also checked whether there was an App Store build, mostly out of curiosity. There isn’t a direct listing, but Apple’s own App Store search is still useful for confirming whether a title has gone through the full notarization pipeline:
https://apps.apple.com/us/search?term=SDL%20Ball
No surprises there.
While digging, I bookmarked this page because it gave me context around running small SDL titles on modern macOS systems and how Gatekeeper treats them differently now — especially for hobby projects and older builds:
https://technotafastore.xyz/game/57311-sdl-ball.html
It didn’t solve the issue by itself, but it helped confirm I wasn’t chasing a phantom bug.
One interesting side note: after the Gatekeeper hurdle, performance was fine. No weird frame pacing, no input lag, even on Apple Silicon. SDL behaves well once it’s actually allowed to run. So if someone complains about “it doesn’t launch” rather than “it runs badly,” I’d bet on permissions before anything else.
If I had to distill this into a quick mental checklist for next time, it would be something like this (very unofficial, very human):
– If the app exits instantly with no error, assume Gatekeeper before assuming a crash
– Try right-click → Open once, don’t go straight to terminal hacks
– Check Apple’s Gatekeeper docs before blaming the framework
– Only strip quarantine flags if you understand what you’re bypassing
Anyway, that’s the whole story. Nothing dramatic, no corrupted files, no broken SDL build — just macOS being macOS. Once you know the trick, it’s a two-minute fix. Before that, it’s an hour of staring at a Dock icon that refuses to explain itself.
Hope this saves you (or someone else) a bit of time the next time a tiny game decides to ghost you.
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