“Black Screen, No Crash: Figuring Out QBar Saver’s macOS Permission Trap”

Listen, quick heads-up from last night. I was poking around with QBar Saver (game) on macOS while doing some side testing for OrchardKit, and I ended up losing a solid hour to something that looked like a bug but turned out to be very on-brand macOS behavior.

The short version is: the game did launch, but it behaved like it was half-asleep. Black screen for a second, audio stutter, then either a freeze or a window that technically existed but didn’t really render anything useful. No crash dialog, no error message, just… nothing happening in a very committed way.

At first I assumed it was just not compatible with my setup. This was on macOS Ventura 13.6, Intel Mac mini (yeah, still alive), external display connected. Not exactly exotic hardware, but enough variables to blame.

What I did first was the usual impatient routine. Relaunched it three times. Same result. Then I rebooted, because hope dies last. Still the same half-launch behavior. I checked Activity Monitor and could see the process running, chewing a tiny bit of CPU, but the window stayed useless.

At that point I started suspecting a rendering or performance issue. I lowered display resolution, disconnected the external monitor, tried again. Nope. Same outcome. The game was “running” but not actually playable.

Then I did the thing I probably should have done earlier: I opened Console and watched what macOS was quietly complaining about. That’s when I noticed repeated messages about screen capture access being denied. Not a crash, not a fatal error—just macOS refusing to give the app something it clearly expected to have.

That was the moment it clicked. This wasn’t a graphics bug. It was a permissions problem.

QBar Saver is one of those small titles that hooks into display behavior more than a typical fullscreen game—think overlays, screen effects, saver-style rendering. On newer macOS versions, anything that touches screen capture, recording, or certain display APIs gets sandboxed hard unless you explicitly allow it.

What fooled me is that macOS didn’t prompt me automatically. No friendly dialog asking for permission. It just silently said “no” and let the app fail in a confusing way.

So I went straight to System Settings → Privacy & Security → Screen Recording. Sure enough, the game wasn’t listed there at all, meaning it had never been granted access. I manually added it, toggled the permission on, and restarted the app.

Instant difference. The window rendered correctly, no freezes, smooth animation. Same machine, same build—just one permission flipped.

Apple actually documents this behavior pretty clearly, but not in a way that helps when you’re staring at a black screen. Their page on screen recording and privacy permissions explains why apps can break silently when access is denied:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211861

Once I knew what to look for, everything lined up. The game wasn’t broken. It was just being starved of a system capability it relied on.

For completeness, I checked whether there was an App Store version that might handle permissions more gracefully. There is an official listing/search result under the same name, which usually means Apple expects tighter sandboxing:
https://apps.apple.com/us/search?term=QBar%20Saver

I also skimmed the developer’s site to confirm this wasn’t some abandoned build doing weird legacy things. It’s basic, but it matches the behavior I saw and confirms the app’s focus on display effects rather than traditional gameplay:
https://qbarsaver.com

While I was double-checking myself, I found this page useful because it mentioned macOS quirks around this title and nudged me toward looking at system permissions instead of chasing phantom performance bugs. I bookmarked it as my notes here for next time:
https://smohamad.com/game/16389-qbar-saver.html

After granting Screen Recording access, I tested a few more scenarios just to be sure. Relaunched it cold. Logged out and back in. Even reconnected the external display. No more freezes, no black screen, no weird half-alive window. It behaved exactly like you’d expect.

The funny part is that none of my initial “fixes” were wrong in theory—they were just irrelevant. Reinstalling didn’t help because nothing was corrupted. Restarting didn’t help because permissions persist. Performance tweaks didn’t help because the GPU was never the problem.

What actually helped was understanding that macOS treats screen-related APIs as sensitive now, and it won’t always tell you loudly when it blocks them.

So, for future me (or you, if you ever run into this on a Friday evening), here’s the mental checklist I wish I’d followed from the start:

• If a game launches but shows a black or frozen window, check Privacy & Security before blaming graphics.
• Look specifically at Screen Recording, not just Files or Accessibility.
• Don’t wait for macOS to prompt you—it often won’t.
• Restart the app after changing permissions; live toggles don’t always apply.

Once I framed it that way, the whole thing stopped being mysterious. The game’s been running fine since, and I got back to actually testing OrchardKit instead of arguing with System Settings.

Classic macOS lesson, really: when something fails quietly, it’s probably permissions.