When it comes to digital tasks you perform regularly, small things matter. I’m pleased to report that a long-standing irritation in macOS has finally disappeared with macOS 15 Sequoia: the inability to open the App Store app from a notification alerting you to an update from the Mac App Store.
Starting in macOS 12 Monterey, clicking an update notification did nothing. Before that, it opened the App Store app, though only to the main screen, not the Updates screen. It was frustrating, and unnecessarily so.
In Sequoia, however, Apple finally made this notification work as it should. When a notification informs you that updates are available, you can click anywhere on the notification to open the Updates screen of the App Store app. Once there, you can click individual Update buttons or use Update All to download all the updates. Much easier!
So, Sequoia users, if you’ve trained yourself to ignore or close the previously non-functional notifications, give them a click going forward.
Before updating to Sequoia, I usually just openned the App Store application manually to see what updates were pending, and to request them.
When I just saw fresh update notification, I remembered your article and tried clicking the Install button, expecting for something meaningful to happen.
It didn’t: App Store launched, displayed the Explore screen, and just stayed there.
When I navigated to Updates, none of pending updates had started. I had to click the Update button on that screen to actually start the installation process.
My expectation was that a button labeled Install would, well, start the installation process. Have any others observed this odd behavior?
Rather than the App Store opening to the Discover page, it now opens with the Updates page. However, that page does not necessarily show all available updates. Before updating, I tap Store>Reload page to get all current updates.
Even if tapping the notification would show all available updates, I prefer this behavior to automatically updating everything on the page. By seeing the page first, I can selectively update apps. For example, updating a currently active Safari extension forces a notice that Safari will be closed and then reopened. I prefer not to have other activity disrupted by that notification, so I want to do that update manually.
I usually apply the same approach as you, Alan, and for similar reasons.
In this case, though, I had clicked the Install button instead of the notification background. Hence my surprise that it did not only not start the installation process; it also stayed on the Discover screen in App Store.
Now I wonder if this is default behavior or if there’s something odd going on this particular Mac.
