Mac Apps Not Updating

RichardC · February 23, 2021, 3:11am

My Mac is refusing to update new versions of apps. (Mojave) The App Store shows programs that have updates. I click on update and get the circling icon but the download does not start.

I’ve gone here and tried all the steps except the last one, call apple. Suggestions before I call Apple?

guylaine · February 23, 2021, 3:54am

+1
Same here. I’m also on Mojave. Happens once in a while. First time I tried a whole bunch of stuff to try to fix it. Nothing worked. Eventually goes away. I suggest you save your precious time and just wait it out.

r2d2 · February 23, 2021, 3:57am

It’s been happening to me on Mojave as well. I tried signing out and signing back in and restarting of which none have worked.

rob · February 23, 2021, 6:16am

This is happening for a very long time on my old Mac mini running macOS High Sierra.

Never found a solution…

anon41602260 · February 23, 2021, 12:23pm

A solution that has worked for me – though very clunky is

Log out of App Store
Navigate to and delete these files:

~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.AppStore.plist
~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.appstored.plist

Reboot
Log back into the App Store
Attempt the download again

The App Store reliability is horrible.

JohnAtl · February 23, 2021, 2:25pm

Thanks!
This worked for me - I have a couple of apps that haven’t been able to update for weeks.

Ajay · February 25, 2021, 9:50am

I faced this issue on Mojave for the longest time and was hoping that the upgrade to Big Sur would fix it. Everything seemed fine for a while but now am seeing this, only on one app so far though!

rms · February 25, 2021, 10:08am

Did you try the solution above that @anon41602260 suggested?

Ajay · February 25, 2021, 10:47am

Not yet. I thought I’d wait for a few days to see if the issue gets resolved on its own.

KevinR · February 25, 2021, 6:08pm

Happening all the time on Big Sur. Every once in a while it’ll let something through. But once it decides to update, it just works

anon41602260 · February 25, 2021, 9:06pm

Today I booted into Safe mode. Ran the “maintenance” set of Onyx utilities. Then booted as normal. Almost immediately, the App Store became aware of all the updates it had not flagged in “Updates” – but CleanMyMacX had known all about them. And, when I ran “Update All” they all completed in less than 2 minutes.

DannyR · February 25, 2021, 9:24pm

I had this issue and updated to the latest Big Sur release and it’s send to have been resolved

rob · March 11, 2021, 9:53pm

Does unfortunately not work for my old Mac mini (running macOS High Sierra 10.13.6 - latest supported version).

After performing all those steps the Mac still refuses to update Spark fro 2.9.15 to 2.9.16

(No update in the Updates tab, an “Update” button on the Spark page, but an endless spinner when clicking on that button)

anon41602260 · March 11, 2021, 9:59pm

I had a similar issue with GoodNotes 5 on Mac refusing to update. I ended up deleting the app and emptying the trash, and then downloading the thing. Of course GoodNotes keeps it’s data in iCloud so there was no lost data issue – which might not be the case with Spark if you deleted it.

rob · March 11, 2021, 10:01pm

I have indeed done that for other Apps in the past, but Spark would have to download a lot of data from scratch…

RichardC · March 17, 2021, 7:48pm

Ok… I started this thread… basically did nothing as far as I know… then all of a sudden several apps that were refusing to upgrade started doing the deed perfectly. (The down time, refusing to update was several days.)