Issue Type: Connectivity
Impact: Moderate
Frequency: Constantly
Date First Experienced: 2020-03-14 00:03:00 (-04:00)
Date Last Experienced: 2021-04-24 13:04:00 (-04:00)
Reproduction Steps:
This is not an issue on windows as far as I know so you need a Mac to do this.
- Install Roblox and Studio if they are not already installed on your Mac. If Roblox is already installed, make sure that you are currently logged into the macOS user account that originally installed Roblox. (If there is a folder named “Roblox” in your Documents folder then you have installed Roblox on that user account)
- Try playing a game or using Studio; Everything should work as expected
- Go to System Preferences > Users & Groups
- Click the padlock that says “Click the lock to make changes” at the bottom left corner of the window and type in your macOS username and password
- Click the “+” icon above the padlock at the bottom left
- Select “Administrator” from the dropdown where it says “New Account:” (none of the other options will work)
- Enter a username and password (make sure that you can remember these credentials or write them down somewhere because you will need them later)
- Click the “Create User” button
- Log out of the current user account by going to the Apple menu and clicking “Log Out”
- Log into the user account that you just created.
- You do not need to select any specific options on the first time setup and you can also skip signing into an Apple ID
- Once you are at the desktop on your new user account, open the web browser of your choice (preferably Chrome or Safari) and go to roblox.com
- Create a new Roblox account or log into an existing Roblox account
- Find a game and click the Play button and click “allow” or “open” on the prompt asking you if you want to open Roblox
- You should see a message that says that you are opening Roblox for the first time; click “open”
Opening the copy of Roblox Studio that is installed to the Applications folder won’t work either.
Expected Behavior:
I expect that the Roblox player opens and allows me to play the game just like how it did on the user account that I first installed Roblox on.
Actual Behavior:
The “Configuring Roblox” dialog appears followed by an error message that says “Failed to install Roblox”
If you check the permissions of the Roblox app, you can see that the user account that you used to install Roblox has read and write permissions, the “admin” group which contains all user accounts with administrator permissions on your Mac has read permissions with no write access and all other users also only have read access which is normal since /Applications (and all of its descendants by default) are read-only for non-administrator users on macOS.
Normally the “admin” group is not in this list at all for any descendant of “/Applications”. I checked the permissions on other third-party apps on my Mac just to confirm that this is a permissions issue and not something else.
The permissions list for Zoom on macOS:
Notice that the admin group is not present on this list which means that any other user in the admin group on this Mac has read and write permissions by default.
Some other applications such as VLC Player had the admin group in the list with read-only permissions just like Roblox and Studio.
Any application that is downloaded from the App Store has the same permissions as Zoom (Zoom is not available on the App Store on macOS)
Workaround:
This workaround is very hacky and does not always 100% work if it even works at all.
If you remove the "admin group from the Roblox Application in Finder by selecting it and clicking File > Get Info and change the permissions to:
You might have to click the lock icon at the bottom right and enter your macOS password before being able to change the permissions
Right click on the Roblox application in the Applications folder and click “Show Package Contents”
Right click the “Contents” folder and click “Get Info” and remove the admin group and change the permissions to the same permissions as above
Before closing the info window, click the gear icon (or “…” icon if you are using macOS Big Sur or newer) and click “Apply to enclosed items” and click “OK” on the prompt.
once the permissions are successfully applied, the Roblox player won’t give the “Failed to install Roblox” error but it still won’t fully work. When you try to launch a game from the Roblox website, it will just open the Roblox games page (roblox.com/games) in a new tab instead of loading into the game.
If you do the steps that I listed above to Roblox Studio, it will work fine except for the fact that it will automatically log into the Roblox account that last used Studio.
here is what I mean by “it will automatically log into the Roblox account that last used Studio.” since it doesn’t really make sense:
The only other workaround is to delete Roblox and Roblox from the Applications folder and reinstall Roblox