I’ve been searching quite a lot last days because instruments was crashing on startup. Finally, I found out my problem by using Tmux, as described [in this github issue] (https://github.com/appium/appium/blob/master/docs/en/appium-setup/troubleshooting.md). This concrete problem is not a bug in Appium and there’s an existing solution/workaround for it, but it took ages to find what was going on.
There are many issues related to instruments crashing on startup (many of them unrelated to appium), but it’d be very helpful (and it could hopefully also reduce the number of posts/issues) if those known incompatibilities/common problems would be put together in the troubleshooting guide -or something similar-