Ask HN: Replacement for MacUpdater which reached EOL on 2026-01-01

6•croemer•1mo ago

I've been a happy user of CoreCode's MacUpdater - a tool for macOS that automatically compared versions of local applications against the latest known ones and would auto-update if local lagged behind. It unfortunately reached EOL on 2026-01-01 - updates no longer work. Now it only lists outdated apps.

Do you know of a good replacement? Does anyone else publicly track latest versions of software and their binaries for (semi-)automated updating?

Or do most apps nowadays use self-updating, so there's no more need for such a central update management app?

Announcement:

  Unfortunately MacUpdater 3's promised lifetime of "until 2026-01-01" is now over.
  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.

MacUpdater 3.5 is now unsupported but free-to-use including all previous "Pro" features. For any questions or more info regarding the disontinuation head to the F.A.Q.

URL: https://www.corecode.io/macupdater/index.html

Comments

Simplita•1mo ago

We ran into the same gap after MacUpdater started drifting. What worked reasonably well for us was splitting the problem instead of trying to replace it 1:1.

Homebrew (plus brew outdated) covered CLI tools and a subset of apps. For GUI apps, we relied on Sparkle-based self-updaters where available and a small script that checks bundle versions against a curated list for the rest.

It’s more manual than MacUpdater, but the upside is you control what’s checked and when. In practice, most actively maintained apps do self-update now, so the remaining pain tends to be niche or enterprise software rather than mainstream apps.

Tomte•1mo ago

Latest: https://max.codes/latest/

croemer•1mo ago

Great suggestion, will try it out!

Unfortunately, Latest supports much fewer apps - maybe those that self-update?

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