got booted, said there was an update, wouldn’t update, same as usual with hanging up part way through install. makes it to about 80mb then just sits there until it times out.
my wife is running Windows and no issues, I’m guessing its an issue with Mac compatibility?
I remember having to jump through hoops a while back when there was an update to Mac OS and granting permissions etc. so ive checked all those boxes already as well as an attempt at a fresh install but even it keeps hanging up.
any REAL help for this?
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You’d want to use the pencil icon to move this to the mac tech support forum.
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Commenting because I’m in the same boat as you. I had WoW on an external hard drive but it wouldn’t even update there. I’m so sad 
Same problem. I am guessing they want to weed out the Mac users. Kinda saw this happening when overwatch had no Mac support then D4 also had no Mac support. Only a matter of time until WoW is no longer playable on a Mac
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Just fixed this by quitting the launcher, then opening up activity monitor in the utilities folder and quitting the AGENT processes that were still running.
Same problem. Trying multiple recommended fixes, but nothing seems to work.
I have managed to install and update it, the main issue I found was that the Battlenet app and the Agent didn’t have disk access. To fix this go to ‘System Settings’ > ‘Privacy & Security’ > ‘Full Disk Access’ and enable ‘Agent’ and ‘Battle’.
After this you need to shut down Battlenet, go to ‘Activity Monitor’ and make sure you stop all Battlenet agents (otherwise there might be multiple running), and reopen Battlenet then hopefully download will work.
If this doesn’t work, shut it down again, launch ‘Disk Utility’, select the hard drive the Battlenet app is on and run ‘First Aid’, then launch Battlenet again and try to install/update.
This worked for me and I hope it does for you too, although now, WoW won’t even launch, so I’m dealing with another issue altogether, I hope you don’t.
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Came here to resolve my “perpetual initializing” bug. Manually giving full disk permissions to Agent.app and Battle.net.app is the solution that fixed it for me.
Heads-up to anyone else trying this: Agent.app is NOT installed in the /Applications folder. On my system it was under /Users/Shared/Battle.net/Agent/Agent.app. The Finder search bar can get you most of the way (be wary of potential duplicates!)
Under System Settings → Privacy & Security → Full Disk Access, you have to click the “+” button at the bottom to manually add new apps. Just drag-and-drop the correct Agent.app (and Battle.net.app) onto the file browser that pops up and click “Open.” It should turn on permissions by default — indicated by a little toggle switch next to the given app.
Hope this helps other Mac users on their updates!
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This is it, ladies and gentlemen. This is the solution.
Thank you.
I know I’m a little late to the game here but seeing as this is still a recurring issue among Mac users, I thought I’d share my solution.
Now, before I get to the solution I’ll give some context that way I can be as helpful as possible.
First, this was tried on both an intel (my MacBook Pro) and an Apple silicon (girlfriend’s MacBook Air) Mac product. It worked for both.
Second, the terminal command will vary depending on the location of your world of Warcraft and battle.net install. Both my girlfriend and I have the entirety of the game and launcher on an external hard drive, which made it a lot easier.
The issue is coming from permissions structure in Unix type operating systems, so if for some reason you’re having this problem on Linux as well then this should work. (That claim is conjecture as I haven’t attempted this on any Linux distros).
The problem with trying to fix the permissions of your “World of Warcraft” folder by itself is that it does not appear that changing the single directory’s permissions does so recursively. Meaning that when you change the permissions of that folder itself, it does not also apply to everything INSIDE of that folder. You can check this yourself by command-clicking or “right” clicking on the folder and selecting “get info”, then at the bottom, expanding the sharing and permissions and then changing all options to “read & write”. After that, go into the folder and repeat the process for another folder. You should be able to observe that folders inside of the “World of Warcraft” folder (like retail, data, etc) still require a change.
Now you could do it manually by yourself, but that would be a painstaking process for every time that you want to play wow and this problem happens. Instead, press command+space and type terminal. Open the terminal app and place the following command in the terminal:
sudo chmod -R u+rwX,g+rwX,o+rwX /“path to your world of Warcraft folder”/*
Obviously, replace the path name to your wow folder.
Lastly, I’m not sure if this is required of the battle.net launcher as well and the reason being is that I applied this to the entirety of our external hard drives. Therefore, if applying these changes does not work for you then you may need to move your battle.net launcher app **and ** world of Warcraft folder into their own directory and repeat the command for that directory path.
If you want to apply it to an external hard drive like I did with ours’, then modify the command to be as follows:
sudo chmod -R u+rwX,g+rwX,o+rwX /Volumes/“name of your external hard drive”/*
One final note is that this is clearly an Apple / Macintosh security feature and that there is not much I can think of that blizzard can do to fix the issue right now. I’m sure there’s some things that they could do, but it requires more work than the average keyboard warrior here probably thinks.
Hope this helps.
If it does help you, please upvote this reply so that others can more easily find it.
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One final note is that this is clearly an Apple / Macintosh security feature and that there is not much I can think of that blizzard can do to fix the issue right now
They could provide a more useful error message other than “Whoops! Looks like something broke (or crashed). Please try restarting Battle.net and/or your computer.” Presumably they can identify that they’re having disk access issues and at least point people in the right direction.
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Small independent game designer
/shrug
… also /sarcasm just in case it wasn’t clear.
None of the fixes worked for me. This one did. Thank you.
Unfortunately you’re probably right. I’ve been playing Blizzard games since the 90s and WoW since vanilla. The only reason I started on these games was that I could play them on my Macs over the years. Once this game is no longer supported on a Mac, I’ll no longer play Blizzard games. I already gave up Diablo after playing it for decades up until the latest releases and don’t play other of their games d/t this.