How to Hide an Update in the Mac App Store
Although you can hide and unhide apps in your App Store purchase list, it turns out that hiding an app in the App Store purchase list does not hide the app in the updates list! I honestly can’t figure out the benefit of hiding an app in the App Store. The list of your purchased apps—a misnomer, as the list includes free apps—is practically unusable anyway: you can neither sort nor search the list. Maddeningly, the Mac App Store sorts your purchased apps by date of first install rather than by name, so it’s difficult even to scan the list manually to find a specific app.
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You can clear the Updates list in the Mac App Store by deleting some cache files on disk, but that’s at best a momentary solution. The unwanted update will return eventually, or immediately if you use the Reload Page (⌘R) command.
A more lasting solution is, counterintuitively, to install the update. The trick is that you can keep more than one copy of a Mac App Store app on disk.
I wonder how long you can keep using the old version. You won’t be able to download it again. You can save a backup, but as some point a certificate will expire or you’ll get a new Mac and need a new receipt file. In theory, the store should be able to fetch one for you, but I wouldn’t rely on that long-term.
Previously:
- Mac App Store Design in Tahoe
- Mac App Store Search Not Showing Mac Apps
- Tahoe’s Mac App Store
- Mac App Store Broken on macOS 10.14 and Earlier
- Is There Hope for the Mac App Store?
4 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
Unless the receipt validation code is poorly written, migration or certificate expiration shouldn't break an app.
Of course some apps may have poorly written code...
@Jeff I thought it was standard practice to check the MAC address, which would necessarily change with migration.
@Michael Yes, but mismatched MAC should cause a receipt refresh.
The app I'm usually is actually free, so I'm not sure it even has receipt validation.
@Jeff Yeah, that’s what I was getting at in the last sentence. It should refresh, but Apple has not been good with supporting the store on older macOS versions, and the older API is deprecated.
