How to fix Messages app closing after macOS Sequoia 15.4 update?

Same here on an M4 Pro 24GB - happens with Home, Mona (Mastodon client), and Tapestry so far. It's been happening fairly regularly, and I finally decided that there was no way I was accidentally hitting Cmd-Q this often, so I decided to search and see if it's common and found myself here.

Glad I found this thread. I thought I was losing my mind or something was uniquely wrong with my Mac. So frustrating. I'm having the exact same behaviour. At first I thought it was Quitter as I had just started using it, but this was set to hide messages after a 10 minute delay, not quit. The behaviour also persisted even after quitting Quitter.

This is clearly a bug that hopefully can be addressed in 15.5 (or even earlier). I also submitted feedback with a link to this thread.

I had seen that 15.4.1 didn't seem to fix the issue, but my MacBook Pro didn't shut anything down automatically for at least a couple days after I installed the update. Then, suddenly, I came back to it after a couple hours yesterday afternoon and it had shut down Mona, Tapestry, and Messages while I was away (so, that's one Apple app, one 3rd party Mac app, and one iPad app).

Also, to clarify: the apps in question are not "crashing" (there is no "XXX shut down unexpectedly" message), they're being shut down automatically by macOS in much the same way that iOS/iPadOS automatically shut down apps to preserve RAM or battery. However, this is new behavior in macOS 15.4 - I haven't seen macOS automatically managing system load by shutting apps down previously, though Apple has been preparing to possibly enable it for some time (by allowing you to turn off the indicator for running apps in the Dock). Like many here, I keep a lot of apps open (I use Mission Control/Spaces pretty heavily), but if you turn off that running apps indicator and usually use one app at a time via the Dock, you might never notice this happening.

Ironically, this is kind of a variation on the bad habit some people have of force quitting apps on iOS/iPadOS to "preserve their battery", which just causes a heavier battery hit when the apps are restarted from scratch every time. In this case, though, it's macOS shutting apps down on devices that generally have more resources than mobile devices, and might even be plugged in.

Finally, if apps are immediately shutting down when you try to open them or your entire OS crashed, you're dealing with a different problem.

Found the source of my problem, and indeed it's a different issue. Somewhere in the past, I sent some stickers from a sticker pack that came with an app on my phone. But the app (and hence the stickers) are not on my Mac. Deleted the stickers from the conversation on my phone (which still had the app on it) and now iMessage has no issues anymore.

Same exact problem here.

15.5 upgrade did not work for me either - issue still persists.

Problem still exists on 15.5

Same here. M1 Studio and an M4 MBP. Messages app, Stocks app, Carrot Weather, others. No notification, just the fact the apps have closed/crashed and aren't running. 15.4 introduced this issue. Hopefully a fix is forthcoming.

I have also found that clicking a completely random link in Safari will cause it to crash, with the "Safari Crashed" dialog box. Before 15.4 I can't recall Safari EVER crashing for any reason on Sequoia or earlier. I did check memory pressure and it's fine. 15.4 is a bodged update for sure. And Messages is still crashing as before- no change.

Same issue here on my M1 iMac. I don't know if this is helpful or not but I find it interesting Messages does not quit on its own when my computer is sleeping. I woke it up this morning after about fourteen hours and Messages was still running. It seems to only spontaneously quit while I'm doing other things on the iMac.

Also, is it just me or is anyone else's Weather app doing the exact same thing?

Experiencing the same issue with my MacBook Air M3. Im on the latest update as of today's date. I run a booking/talent agency and use messages all day to communicate with my team and clients. It is becoming extremely frustrating that it keeps "quitting or crashing". No error log or way to report it, just simply shuts down. Please fix the issue!!!

I forgot to note that I have signed out of Messages, Safe Booted, logged back into Messages, still goes "poof" after a few minutes to an hour. Hey Apple, this better be fixed in macOS 15.5! 15.4/4.1 are bodged updates. Sick of relaunching Messages!!!!

Update to 15.5 has NOT fixed the issue for me. Messages is snappier in loading a conversation history when scrolling back, but only up to a certain point (about 4yrs of daily messaging loaded, but more years are available). Then the app becomes sluggish, with spinning beach ball showing regularly. Pressing cmd-P to print the conversation to pdf results in constant beach ball. Left the app open overnight to sort it all out in its own pace, next morning is was shut down.

i see your point, not sure how to assess what activity monitor tells me. Seems to take a lot of CPU, but not a lot of memory. I have a 16Gb M3 MacBook Air, should be enough memory. Other applications run smoothly alongside the messages app. I submitted crash reports, hope it gets sorted out.