Adopt apps to homebrew the you want brew to update. It’s up to you.
I adopted a bunch of electron and sparkle apps to homebrew, so i can set and forget. They will usually be updated before I run them.
And the ones I do not adopt - they will show if an update is available, but won’t install it automatically? Is that correct?
Thanks for your help!
Pretty much, yes
Thanks. I’ll set one machine to use as much Homebrew as possible, and be sparing with the other, and see how they work out.
You’re right about the author being responsive! The update issued this morning hung on checking for updates, so I posted an issue on GitHub, and an hour later he released a fix. Good (also unhealthy) for a Sunday morning!
1 Like
As a developer myself every day is the same when you’re eager to work on your latest and greatest thing!
Updatest dev improved scanning of Sparkle apps bring down my humongous app scan from 80 seconds to 20 seconds.
On two Macs here it claimed to be ‘checking for updates"‘ for >1hour. Once the hotfix was installed it took <1 minute.
Now I just need some updates to come along so I can compare performance with my other tools.
1 Like
Working well so far, but homebrew seems to be behind on some updates, that Macupdater has found but homebrew has not.
Is there a way to un-adopt an app without uninstalling it? I tried for Orion with
brew uninstall Orion
and it removed the app from Applications, not just the cask. Fortunately it did not remove all the associated files and reinstalling it showed all my bookmarks and extensions intact.
Apparently, the last update was issued today:
MacUpdater History:
3.5.0 (Jan 2026):
Unfortunately MacUpdater 3’s promised lifetime of “until 2026-01-01” is now over
This is the last and final update to MacUpdater 3
There will be no MacUpdater 4 or any continuation of the MacUpdater product from us
Our daily maintainaince has been stopped and we don’t verify updates anymore
You can keep using this unsupported version for as long as you wish
This version is free-to-use for everyone including “Pro” features
The database server will be kept running until 2026-12-31
Is your company is looking to buy / license MacUpdater’s update tech? Head here
Surprised or having question about MacUpdater’s discontinuation? Look here
NOTE: If your helper tool is stuck at “permissions required” after update, just reboot
1 Like
In this thread Jared said it was a fact of life that Homebrew would not anlways show updates as rapidly as MacUpdater, and that he thought the overhead to do as MacUpdater does is part of the reason for its demise.
I dont know the answer to your question about un-adopting from Homebrew, but the AI summary for “unadopt Homebrew Updatest” says (amongst other methods) it is
brew uninstall --cask <cask_name>. I’m sure Jared would reply quickly to the question.
I have now moved over to using Updatest as my primary update tool. I have adopted all adoptable apps, except App Store apps as recommended. (Updatest announces these and takes you to the App Store, like MacUpdater did). I still update some apps from within the app, mainly when it announces it self in the app.
Before doing this I asked Jared about risk of getting bad updates. This was his reply:
“ As with anything, there’s always a level of risk. When you’re talking about Sparkle, Electron and Mac App Store there’s 0 risk to updating your apps, period. These sources are pulled from the app binary themselves.
GitHub and Brew have a very small chance of having issues. Malware on Brew? I’m not sure, but it’s maintained by either the developer themselves or the community and Homebrew has a reputation to uphold. There’s a variety of safety checks in Brew (sha hashsum, integrity checks) also by default Brew typically flags every update it does for Gatekeeper (on your Mac by default) to scan too I think.
Most of the sources in Updatest that it fetches require manual action (GitHub, Electron, Mac App Store (due to sudo from MAS CLI), Brew (Password only apps)). The only apps that Updatest can auto install itself are Sparkle and Brew (non password apps).
Updatest was designed with security/privacy first. If that helps at all. Happy to answer any follow up questions! ”
1 Like
brew uninstall --cask 1Password
also removed the app from Applications. Easily reinstalled from the website. I’ll have to ask Jared.
And Jared quickly replied:
Okay so “uninstall” via Brew will always remove the app. If you just want to unlink it, you need to head to Brew’s caskroom directory:
/opt/homebrew/Caskroom (this is for Apple Silicon)
Then you need to delete the folder that corresponds to the cask name. Once you do that, it breaks the link between the app and Homebrew, but does not remove the app.
This works.
I guess it’s back to MacUpdate which I was using before I found MacUpdater.