How to Fix "Program is damaged and can't be opened. You should move it to the Trash."

By: Kelly Heffner Wilkerson
November 26, 2019 at 02:00 PM

On a Mac, the error message "[Program Name] is damaged and can't be opened. You should move it to the Trash." means that there's a problem opening a downloading disk image (.dmg) file. There are two usual causes for this problem:

The downloaded file is actually broken. We usually only see a corruption of the downloaded installer file when the download was interrupted or if a "download manager" program was used to download the DMG (as is common in Firefox.) We recommend trying to download the DMG again, using a different browser (like Safari or Google Chrome).
Your Mac settings don't allow for software from Apple identified developers. It's common to have your security settings only allow Mac App Store apps. Our software is not in the Mac App Store, but it is signed with our registered Apple Developer identifier certificate (aka an "identified developer" by Apple.)
- Open your Mac System Preferences, and select Security & Privacy.
- Set your "Allow apps downloaded from" is set to Mac App Store and identified developers.
- Try opening the DMG again.
- After opening the DMG and using the program, if you usually prefer to only open apps from Mac App Store, you can set your preference back.

If you're still having issues opening the DMG file, contact us. We'll help get the DMG working, and in case it is actually a broken file on our server, we definitely want to know ASAP! ;)

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