Via Jeff Johnson and Michael Tsai (@mjtsai), I see that CoreCode is planning to discontinue its MacUpdater tool and is hoping to sell or license it.
From CoreCode’s news page (note that the press release is a PDF):
2025-04-30: MacUpdater Discontinuation and Acquisition Opportunities:
We will stop developing MacUpdater after the discontinuation of version 3.x next January. However, we invite interested parties to aquire and continue the project or license the technology. Read the full press release here.
The product is excellent and the support team oustanding, so I hope that MacUpdater doesn’t suffer the fate of so many other useful tools.
What do you all think of the alternative solution of using Homebrew & a GUI front end called “AppLite”? Seems a bit complicated for those not adept at using the Terminal.
AppLite doesn’t require Terminal in its install and config. It really is a GUI solution - and a nice looking one. For me, its range of apps is nowhere near as good as MacUpdater - but will hopefully it continue to broaden its defined range to apps.
Got it, but to avoid having to reinstall all of one’s apps via Homebrew, there’s still a somewhat involved process of getting Homebrew to adopt them, isn’t there?
FYI, I have just done a census of the apps on my Mac. I (an app junkie?) have 203 apps from outside the Mac App Store. Only 29 can be managed by Applite (14%). Not enough to make me use Applite beyond a little testing and evaluation.
Since the news of MacUpdater’s announcement first broke a few months ago I have been using a small app called Latest, alongside MacUpdater.
It is not as full featured as MacUpdater but is free and seems pretty solid.
For me, Latest has better coverage than Applite. Latest includes 33% of my apps which do not come from the Mac App Store. Apart from those in the App Store, Latest only detects apps that use the Sparkle framework for updates.
First I’d heard of this. What a shame! The first thing I do each morning is to see what MacUpdater is offering me. I checked their website and for a standard user they are charging $4.40. I’d be happy to pay ten times that for such a useful utility! But probably would not use it if it went to a subscription model, as I dislike those.
By comparison, the old MacUpdate Desktop app used to cost $20/year, IIRC. Similar function, but completely different developer.
I have been aggressively reducing the number of software/service subscriptions I pay for, but I would be happy pay a reasonable subscription fee for MacUpdater. Four or five dollars a month sounds right to me.
Unfortunately, I imagine the developers have looked at options like that and decided that for whatever reason, that wouldn’t work for them.