MacUpdater

MacUpdater is a small utility for Mac which tracks all of your non-Mac App Store and tells you whether you need to update them. I think it can track your Mac App Store updates, but I don’t know why you would need to since Apple does that anyway.

When I first heard about this app, I was a little hesitant mainly because of the name. Before app stores, MacUpdate was a website aggregating shareware and freeware apps for the Mac. Then I started to hear horror stories about these aggregation sites like Download.com and MacUpdate.com that more malware was being bundled in with these downloads. As far as I know, MacUpdater isn’t affiliated with any of these types of sites.

How it works is that it scans all of your apps and will put a number in your menu bar of how many apps need updating. If no apps need to be updated, you will see a check mark. The apps that do need to be updated have a button next to them that you click on and it begins to update the app in place.

One of the downsides of the app is that you don’t get to see the developer notes about what is in the update. You can click on an “i” next to the app which is supposed to show you the information, but in my experience, that doesn’t always work.

Most apps have no problem downloading and installing the update right within MacUpdater which makes the utility nice and convenient to use especially if you have a lot of third party apps. If there is an app that has a major point release that requires additional payment, it will let you know. You will have to do that manually, however. It is really nice to see at a glance which apps need updating and I would highly recommend checking it out.

MacUpdater can be found at https://www.corecode.io/macupdater/. You can update 10 apps for free and then after that it costs $11. 07 or 9.99 Euros.