Automator creates corrupt APP (MacOS 13.3)

Thank you, Luis Sequeira1! You seem to be one of the cornerstones of the support community. Your help is highly appreciated!

I fully agree that your point b) that is the typical problem. And I suspect that here is the culprit in the present case.

On the other hand in many cases you have to live with older equipment (like a 13 years old fax machine) as long as possible or with specific add-ons (e. g. to access SMART data of USB drives) and in some cases it is difficult to add them after a clean install. If you are in doubt you use the migration assistent and then you are almost in the situation with updating the old system. So the iMac Pro had the simple update. The Mac mini had the way with the migration assistent as there was no macOS 12.

I enclose the EtreCheck report for the Mac mini.

I browsed through the report. There was almost nothing that looked alarming to me, except the cashes. There are some relicts of old installations that might be reactivated with new licenses or are still there as part of the documentation of previous situations. - Nevertheless, fell free to comment. Even nasty comments might be helpful. Thank you in advance.

Thank you for your kind reply and your suggestions!

Configuration: iMac Pro 2017 and Mac mini 2023 (M2 Pro) with macOS 13.4, Apple SSD, APFS formatted. I usually store Automator workflows and Apps in a shared folder. For testing I now used the desktop. In all cases (except for test) I used an administrator account.

Please, note that the way I use Automator is exactly the same as before with macOS 12 on the iMac Pro. I create and save workflows, test them and then use the option key to save as app ("Programm" in my German version). With macOS 13.4 the result is a corrupt or probably simply incomplete App, cf. below.

No "cleaner", but Bitdefender (and in several cases it was good to have Bitdefender in the past!). Results are the same when Bitdefender is deactivated.

As you suggested I created a new user account (standard user) and created a new workflow (simply to take a screenshot and store it on the desktop). Same problem with with corrupted app, i. e. systemwide effect.

Now some more details with one of my old workflows/apps. The following screenshot shows the corrupt app miniDownl (generated with Automator 2.10, Universal, Copyright 2004-2022, with macOS 13.4), the old app miniDownl Kopie (still working with 13.4, but generated with 12.6.4 and Automator 2.10, Universal, but Copyright 2004-2016) and the workflow miniDownl.

The icon of the new app looks suspicious and the size is even a bit smaller than the workflow and only about 1/10 of the old app miniDownl Kopie.

Doubleklick on miniDownl produces an error message similar to what I posted earlier:

... may be damaged or incomplete ...

The size suggests that at least it might be incomplete. Actually the corrupt package looks like

whereas the old package has many more ingredients:

So it seems to be obvious that the new app is no app and cannot be executed. It looks like the runtime part is missing.

Yes, the culprit could be some problem with the access rights or Bitdefender. Bitdefender shield was deactivated for tests, although not uninstalled - my experience is that uninstalling will only keep you busy. (Try to imagine how often I uninstalled and installed again.) And in the case of the iMac Pro the installation of macOS 13 was simply an update of macOS 12, and then the problem was there.

Unfortunately, I cannot simply replace the new Automator by the old one as this is part of the system.

I still have no realistic idea, but at least I now understand the problem a little bit better.

Thank you again!

PS: Maybe in the afternoon and with a good cup of coffee I shall uninstall Bitdefender and see what happens.

Nobody seems to use Automator any more. The problem persists with MacOS 13.4.

PS: You can create an App with AppleScript and execute the Automator Workflow (not the App) if you do not have a Mac with an older OS (cf. my original contribution).

Of course, I sent feedback to Apple, but ...

Thank you to xnav and Luis Sequeira! Solved!

Yes, that solves the Problem. But it would even be better, if Apple would make the user interface to work as expected and as it was before. So Luis, I think this was your point a).

And why was I unable to find the solution? I searched for Automator ... Do we need AI, like ChatGPT?

Update: With MacOS 13.3.1 same problem. Independent of hardware as far as I could check. Seems to be Ventura specific.