Avast app won't open anymore on mac

Avast Mac Security
1

Hi,

I’ve been using avast for years now, never had any issue. With Mac OS Catalina, I’ve noticed that now (after a while) it suddenly won’t open anymore at all. I’ve tried to double click it in the app folder in finder, nothing worked.
The avast icon won’t show up in the menubar at the top of my screen either.
I wanted to reinstall it but because I can’t open it nor have the icon in the menubar I can’t even install it. What should I do?

BTW I’ve checked that avast still has all the permissions needed to function according to your websites information.

2

Hello,

this is very strange. To uninstall Avast, please open Terminal.app and run following command:

open /Applications/Avast.app/Contents/Backend/utils/com.avast.uninstall.app

But before you do this I would like to ask you to help us debug the issue if you have a bit of time. You can try this command in Terminal.app to load the UI task again:

/Applications/Avast.app/Contents/Backend/hub/usermodules/040_gui.sh start

If this does not resolve the issue, I would be very much interested in the output of following commands in Terminal.app

launchctl list | grep com.avast.Antivirus
ps -ax | grep Avast

I am also wondering whether there is any crash of the UI. You would find them in Console.app → Crash Reports.

Please feel free to continue this topic via e-mail. You can reach me at jakub.bednar at avast.com.

Thank you very much for your report.

Jakub

3

I was looking to uninstall Avast Free on my MacBook Pro so I clicked on the Uninstall Avast Security tab on the top left of my screen when Avast is open and it starts the process. It goes through the process and asks me to enter my PW as “Uninstall Avast is trying to install a new helper tool”. When I enter PW the process continues and says its stopping components then asks me to enter PW again as “Avast Security is trying to modify a System Extension”. After this it says Uninstallation failed - Failed to remove system extensions.

I have spent the last hour searching on the forum and tried various suggestions but have been unsuccessful. Any help would be really appreciated.

4

Hello, this is strange.

The step is trying to our network extensions from the system.

Alternate way to uninstall Avast is to do it manually from Terminal.app. You have to run following command:

sudo /Applications/Avast.app/Contents/Backend/hub/uninstall.sh

Then reboot your Mac and Avast should be gone.

Best regards,

Jakub Bednar

5

The app literally does not open. I only got Avast to work one time, and it was on the very same day I installed it. Hasn’t worked since, so I decided to uninstall the application. But because the app does not open, I cannot access the methods needed to uninstall the program. Just trapped with an unusable application that cannot be deleted, sitting on my desktop now and probably collecting data for what idk. At this point I just want it gone.

6

Thank you very much. The command above via Terminal worked.