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macOS app update manager — check and update apps from Sparkle, Homebrew, Mac App Store, and GitHub Releases

9 starsGo

Updater – one command for macOS app updates

by zhengda-lu·Mar 1, 2026·3 points·0 comments
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AI Analysis

●●SolidSolve My ProblemCozy

Unified macOS app updater supporting six sources, but homebrew-cask upgrades and mas already cover this.

Strengths
  • •Detects app update source automatically (Sparkle feed, cask, MAS, GitHub API) — no manual routing
  • •Interactive TUI with pinning/ignoring reduces cognitive load vs. remembering which updater to use
  • •Graceful fallback: stale Sparkle feed → tries Homebrew cask next, no manual intervention
Weaknesses
  • •Homebrew and mas (dependencies) already solve core use case for 80% of users
  • •No clear advantage over `brew upgrade && mas upgrade && softwareupdate -l` piped together
Target Audience

macOS users and developers managing app updates across fragmented package systems.

Similar To

Homebrew · mas · App Store Updates

Post Description

I built updater to solve a small but annoying problem: macOS app updates are fragmented across different systems.

updater scans installed apps, determines where each app should be checked (Sparkle, Homebrew casks/formulae, Mac App Store via mas, GitHub Releases, and macOS system updates), then runs source specific update actions from the terminal. It also has an interactive TUI (run `updater` with no args).

A few commands:

updater check updater update --all updater update "1Password"

Repo: https://github.com/lu-zhengda/updater

Would love feedback, especially on reliability and edge cases.

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