I installed it and nothing happens: the app will not open, or the installer hangs and says "Application not responding"

You installed Booked Solid, you opened it, and nothing happens. No window, or a window that never gets anywhere. Or the trouble started earlier and you never got that far: when I go to install the app it keeps hanging up and says "Application not responding", you have force quit and tried again, you have deleted the app and reinstalled, and you got the same thing. This page covers both halves of that, in the order the cause usually turns out to be.

Work down it. Each one takes under a minute to rule out.

First, work out where it actually stops

Two different problems produce the same sentence, and the fix for one does nothing for the other. Before you touch anything, find out whether Booked Solid ever landed on your computer at all.

• Mac: open your Applications folder and look for Booked Solid.
• Windows: open the Start menu and search for Booked Solid.

If it is not there, the install never finished. Start at number 1. If it is there, the install did finish and what you have is a launch problem. Start at number 2 and work down.

Knowing which of those two you have, and whether you are on a Mac or on Windows, is also the most useful thing you can put in a ticket, because every set of steps below splits at exactly that point.

1. It hangs during the install itself

This is the one that shows up as Application not responding, a spinning beachball, or an installer window that sits there while nothing moves. What follows is not a workaround. It is the install done in the exact order it has to happen, and on a Mac the order is the whole thing.

Mac: the order matters

There is no real installer on a Mac. The .dmg you downloaded is a disk image, and the app has to be copied out of it before it is used. Running Booked Solid from the disk image, or from your Downloads folder, causes update and stability problems, which is why getting it into Applications is not an optional tidy-up step at the end.

1. Open the downloaded .dmg file, usually in your Downloads folder.
2. In the window that opens, drag the Booked Solid icon into your Applications folder and let the copy finish. Give it a minute before you decide it is stuck.
3. Eject the disk image in Finder: click the eject icon next to Booked Solid in the sidebar.
4. Open Booked Solid from Applications. Not from the .dmg window, and not from Downloads.
5. On the first open, if macOS asks whether you want to open an app downloaded from the internet, click Open. If it blocks the app instead of asking, right-click the icon in Applications, choose Open, then click Open again in the dialog. You can also go to System Settings > Privacy & Security and click Open Anyway.

If you force quit part way through step 2, delete whatever landed in Applications and start the drag again rather than trying to open what is there. If macOS asks whether to replace an existing copy, choose Replace.

Windows

1. Find the downloaded .exe in your Downloads folder.
2. Double-click it. If the blue "Windows protected your PC" screen appears, click More info, then Run anyway.
3. Let the installer finish, then open Booked Solid.

The Windows installer is a normal wizard, not a one-click install. It asks where to put the app and then waits for you to click through. So if it looks like it has stalled and nothing is moving, check your taskbar for an installer window sitting behind your browser, waiting for an answer that nobody has given it.

Deleting it and reinstalling, on its own, will not fix this

Almost everyone tries that first, and by itself it is a dead end. If the step going wrong is the same every time, opening the app from the .dmg window or closing the blue Windows screen instead of clicking through it, then a reinstall reproduces the problem exactly rather than clearing it. Reinstalling is worth doing once you have changed something about how you install. Not before.

2. Windows: it never really installed

This is the quiet version of the problem. Nothing hangs and nothing warns you later, the app is simply not there when you go looking for it.

On Windows you see a blue "Windows protected your PC" screen. If you click Don't run, or close it, the installer stops and nothing is installed - but it can look like it worked, so the app you later try to open is not there.

Run the downloaded file again, click More info, then Run anyway. That screen appears because our Windows builds are not code-signed yet. It is not a virus warning.

3. Mac: you are opening it from the disk image

If you double-click the app while it is still inside the mounted .dmg window, it may open once and behave strangely, or not open at all. The fix is the Mac sequence in number 1 above: drag it into your Applications folder first, then open it from there. Do not run it from Downloads either.

4. Mac: "Booked Solid is damaged and can't be opened"

This exact wording is not the usual unknown-developer warning, and the "Open anyway" trick does not fix it. It means macOS quarantined the download, which usually happens when the .zip was used instead of the .dmg.

Use the .dmg from the download page. If you already have the app in Applications, open Terminal and run:

xattr -cr "/Applications/Booked Solid.app"

Then open it normally. If it still refuses, open a ticket and tell us your macOS version.

5. The app opens, but Otto never answers

If the window is there and looks right but nothing comes back when you type, the app is fine and it is waiting on Claude. Booked Solid runs on your own Claude subscription, so it cannot think until you are signed in to Claude. The app shows a one-tap sign-in when that is what is missing.

6. The window is there but blank or frozen

That is a different problem with its own fix, including how to recover without losing work. See The app went blank or froze: how to recover without losing work.

7. It is already running

Booked Solid only runs one copy at a time. Launching it again does not start a second one: it brings the window you already have back to the front. So if that window is minimised or sitting on another desktop, what you get is the app you already had rather than the fresh window you were expecting, which reads as nothing happening. Check your taskbar or Dock before reinstalling anything.

If it still freezes after the install is done properly

Quit Booked Solid completely and open it again. That is the right first move, not a last resort: a fresh start rebuilds the window, and it does not affect your work. Your leads, files and notes live in your Booking HQ folder on your own disk, never inside the app window, so a window that stops responding cannot take them with it.

If the same freeze keeps coming back, send a support bundle so it can be traced instead of guessed at:

1. In the right pane, open Settings and stay on the General sub-tab.
2. Scroll down to the support section and switch on Support logging.
3. Reproduce the freeze.
4. Come back to Settings > General, click Generate Support Bundle, and attach the file it saves to your ticket.

One honest limit on that. A support bundle only helps for a freeze that happens once Booked Solid is running, because the app has to be open to record anything. If the hang happened during the install, before the app ever launched, there is nothing in its logs to collect and the bundle will not show it. In that case skip the bundle and tell us the operating system and the exact point it stopped instead.

Still nothing?

Open a ticket at support.booked.kivimedia.co and tell us three things: your computer (Windows or Mac, and which version), whether it stopped during the install or after it, and what you saw on screen word for word. That is usually enough to solve it on the first reply. Without the first two we have to write back and ask, and that costs you a day for no reason.

If you have not actually installed it yet

If you are not sure you ever got as far as installing, start from the beginning instead: Start here: from download to your first booking task, step by step. It walks the whole path in order.

Other ways people describe this

• Nothing happens when I open it.
• I installed it and nothing happens.
• The app will not open, will not start, will not launch.
• It won't open, it won't start, it won't launch. (Some people type it wont, without the apostrophe.)
• Nothing launches when I click the icon.
• I double-click it and nothing.
• It does not do anything when I click it.
• Booked Solid will not run on my computer.
• When I go to install the app it keeps hanging up and says "Application not responding".
• Application not responding. Not responding. The app is not responding.
• The installer keeps hanging up. The installer hangs, or the installer freezes.
• It freezes while installing. The install is stuck.
• I've force quit and tried again.
• I've deleted the app and reinstalled and same thing.