How to disable the crash reporter on Mac

When an app crashes on macOS, a dialog appears asking whether you want to send a report to Apple. For most power users — developers, people running beta software, or anyone who crashes apps often — this dialog is more interruption than help. One command silences it permanently.

What the crash reporter does

macOS's crash reporter (the ReportCrash daemon) watches for application crashes, captures a stack trace and diagnostic report, then prompts you to send it to Apple. The data helps Apple and third-party developers identify and fix bugs.

The dialog is easy to dismiss but impossible to skip — it steals focus, sometimes appearing on top of whatever you're doing, and if you're writing or testing software that crashes regularly it becomes genuinely disruptive. Many developers turn it off because they're already reading crash logs directly from ~/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports.

The Terminal command

Open Terminal (Applications → Utilities) and run:

# suppress the crash reporter dialog entirely
defaults write com.apple.CrashReporter DialogType none

From now on, when an app crashes, the dialog won't appear. macOS still writes the crash report to disk — you just aren't interrupted.

To also suppress the notification-style (non-dialog) crash alerts:

# use notification center instead of a blocking dialog (alternative mode)
defaults write com.apple.CrashReporter UseUNC 1

Setting UseUNC 1 routes crash notifications through Notification Center — less intrusive than a blocking dialog, more visible than nothing. Pair it with DialogType none and crashes are logged silently.

How to re-enable it

# undo — restore the crash reporter dialog
defaults write com.apple.CrashReporter DialogType crashreport

No restart required. The dialog comes back for the next crash immediately.

Crash logs still exist — here's where they live

Silencing the dialog doesn't delete crash data. macOS continues writing full crash reports to:

~/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/

Each report is a .ips or .crash file named with the app name, timestamp, and process ID. Open one in Console.app or a text editor to read the full stack trace. If you're debugging a crash, this folder is where to look — you get everything the dialog would have sent, minus the interruption.

When you might want to leave it on

If you rarely see crashes and you're running release software, the default dialog is a low-cost way to help app developers fix bugs. The data sent is anonymized diagnostic information — stack traces, not personal files. Turn it off if the interruptions outweigh the benefit; leave it on if you want to contribute passively to software quality.