Fritzing runs fine on macOS Sequoia, Apple Silicon or Intel.
Fritzing 1.0.5 still needs Rosetta 2 to run on Apple SIlicon (M1… M4).
Recent versions of macOS do not have Rosetta installed by default anymore.
This usually is not a problem, or easy to fix. However, the error messages shown if it doesn’t work are not helpfui, at least when I tried it on macOS Sequoia.
Installation works as usual, just drag and drop:
When we start Fritzing for the first time, macOS might ask to install Rosetta:
To allow this, you might be asked for your user password:
Now, here is where the trouble can start.
If you deny installing Rosetta, macOS will not ask again. Ever. Even if you have been asked when installing an App completely unrelated to Fritzing, and denied Rosetta back then, it will not ask again. This is unlucky, especially if it was weeks ago, and you don’t remember it at all.
Lets say you click “Cancel”. The installer dialog will stay forever, or until you manually end it:
From now on, when you try to start Fritzing, macOS will show this frustrating message:
At this point Fritzing code can’t execute, so obviously this message is not from us. But if there is an easy way to configure the message, I’d be happy to learn about it 
Anyway, now the fix. Lets install Rosetta 2.
There are multiple ways to do this, here we will use the terminal, and run the command
softwareupdate --install-rosetta
First, to check if this is really a Rosetta issue, lets try to start Fritzing at the terminal. We will see this error message (bad CPU type…):
Now lets run the command to install rosetta:
If successful, we now see:
And now Fritzing will run fine:
We have planned to provide a universal build, that can run on Intel and Apple Silicon nativ, without Rosetta. The path for this is:
- Release Fritzing 1.0.6, we already have some fixes we don’t want to delay further.
- Migrate the Framework from Qt 6.5 to Qt 6.7.
- Release Fritzing 1.1.0.
Since the M1 is available, we have checked native builds several times. We will release a universal build, especially in case Rosetta is faded out. This just didn’t get priority over the real 
yet.