Troubleshooting

A permission was denied

If you accidentally denied Screen Recording, Microphone, Camera, or Accessibility during setup, you don’t need to reinstall anything:

1. Open Settings > Permissions.
2. Find the denied row and click its Open System Settings button — this deep-links straight to the correct macOS privacy pane (Screen Recording, Microphone, Camera, or Accessibility) instead of the generic Privacy & Security page.
3. Enable Petal in that list.
4. Come back to Petal. For Camera specifically, the Settings preview has a Try again button that rechecks the permission without relaunching. For other permissions, relaunch Petal if the change doesn’t take effect immediately.

If Camera permission shows as granted in System Settings but the preview in Settings still stays dark, relaunch Petal — this is a known WebKit attribution quirk where the app-level permission check and the actual camera request can briefly disagree after a fresh grant.

Camera or microphone is in use by another app

If another app (Zoom, FaceTime, a browser tab, and so on) is holding your camera, Petal’s camera preview reports “camera is in use by another app” instead of showing video. Quit or stop the other app’s use of the camera, then re-select your camera in the Camera dropdown (or close and reopen Settings) to retry the preview. The Try again button only appears in the permission-denied state, not here. The same applies if your microphone track fails to publish — check nothing else has it locked.

A device disappeared from the list

If a microphone or speaker you previously selected gets unplugged, Petal falls back to the first available device in that dropdown rather than leaving the selection pointing at a device that no longer exists. Reconnect the device and reselect it in Settings > Devices if you want it back.

An update seems stuck

Petal checks for updates automatically on launch. If you want to check right now instead of waiting:

1. Open Settings > Updates.
2. Click Check for updates.
3. The result appears inline: you’re up to date, an update is ready (look for the “Restart now” toast to install it), an update installed and Petal is relaunching, or an error with a specific reason.

If it reports an error, note the message — it’s the real underlying failure string, not a generic “something went wrong.”

Exporting logs for a bug report

1. Open Settings > Diagnostics.
2. Click Export logs.
3. Petal reveals a zip of your local logs in Finder (or reports the saved path if it can’t open Finder directly). Nothing is uploaded automatically — attach the zip yourself to whatever bug report or email you’re sending.

Logs also live directly at ~/Library/Logs/Petal/petal.log if you need to tail them live while reproducing a problem.

Factory reset

Reset Petal is the last resort — use it if the app is in a broken state that permission fixes and updates don’t resolve.

What it clears, from Settings > Reset > Reset Petal:

• Your local identity (display name, identity color) and onboarding state
• Saved rooms and favorites
• Device choices (microphone/speaker selections)
• Saved window positions and sizes (main window, meeting window, pill window, window-picker layout)

Petal quits automatically after resetting.

What it does not clear on its own (macOS only): macOS permissions (Screen Recording, Microphone, Camera, Accessibility). If you also want to reset those — for example, to force the OS permission prompts to reappear from scratch — Petal shows the exact Terminal commands to run after it quits:

tccutil reset ScreenCapture com.petal.app
tccutil reset Accessibility com.petal.app
tccutil reset Microphone com.petal.app
tccutil reset Camera com.petal.app

Petal also copies these commands to your clipboard when you confirm the reset (when clipboard access is available — if the copy fails, it says so and the commands stay visible above the confirm button). Run them in Terminal, then relaunch Petal to go through permission setup again.