Update on Options for Updating Apps

With nearly over 500 apps installed on the MacBook I use for testing, keeping everything updated is a daily chore. If I wait a week between scans, I end up with 60-80 available updates to install. Based on my experience, the app updater that catches everything doesn't exist. Historically, the app that does the best job is MacUpdater, but, absent any breaking news, it will become deprecated at the end of December.

Today, I ran several updaters on my system to determine how they compared.

• Macupdater found 27 available updates. It installed 17 of them automatically and gave me various options to install the other 10.
• Latest (free) found 16 updates
• Updatest (beta-paid) found 17 updates
• Cork (paid, free version available if you compile it yourself - homebrew only) found 5 updates out of 235 eligible apps. It also updated five CLI packages, something most other updaters ignore.
• MAS (Mac App Store) - Using the more reliable CLI rather than the GUI found four updates out of 238 eligible apps.
• Topgrade (free) - Found all of the Homebrew and MAS updates and also checked for macOS, Rust, Node, VSCodium, Mamba, Bun, pip3, Tex Live, Mise, Tlmgr, Yarn, PnPm and Docker
• CleanMyMac (paid) found 12 updated (If all you've ever heard about this app is negative, read my review.)

A Few Tips

• Cork recently added a feature that automatically adds any apps that you have installed to Homebrew if they are eligible. It added more than 100 for me.
• If you have a Setapp subscription, it handles the updates for any of its apps that you use.
• The CleanMyMac updater only lists apps that do not need any user interaction/
• There is a Raycast extension that will update your Homebrew apps and formulae.
• Some apps, such as Obsidian, have internal updates for extensions and themes that you have to run inside the app.