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The App Store on Mountain Lion pushes update notifications through Notification Center. Unfortunately, this also happens for users that are not system administrators (and so cannot run the App Store). How can I turn this off?

Notification Center has preferences, where applications can be vetted, but App Store does not appear in this list.

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Isn't there an option in the System Preferences -> Notifications to disable App Store ? – Hoshts Aug 16 '12 at 7:47
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App Store does not appear in the list of applications there. – Thilo Aug 16 '12 at 7:53
Bugger. Sorry for that. At work so couldn't look it up. – Hoshts Aug 16 '12 at 7:54
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Extra ugliness: You cannot dismiss the notification at all without bringing up App Store (which non-admin users cannot even use), and it also does not appear to fade away after some time either. – Thilo Oct 30 '12 at 5:09

7 Answers

up vote 7 down vote

I recently discovered that you can dismiss individual notifications by clicking on the app store update notification, and swiping/dragging to the right. I do it about 20x a day because I don't have the time to restart my iMac every day for software updates.

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Also, on a Magic Mouse (and presumably a trackpad), you can swipe on the top without clicking to right for this same behavior. – Ethan Lee Nov 16 '12 at 0:30
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+1. This is what I do now. And yes, I do it about 20x a day because it keeps coming back all the time. – Thilo Nov 22 '12 at 1:42
up vote 6 down vote

I just discovered the missing solution here: http://osxdaily.com/2012/11/15/stop-software-update-mac-os-x/

You can selectively disable notifications about specific software updates you don't care about (like useless App updates) by control-clicking the update inside the App Store to reveal a hidden "Hide Update" option.

This is best for those who want to keep Notification Center active for all its other uses (calendar alarms, etc.) and who also want to be notified about critical software updates. It should permanently mute notifications about certain software updates (until that software comes out with a new update).

(Hopefully this also works for the case where non-admin users are getting update notifications they can't act on.)

Screen-capture from OSxdaily article:

enter image description here

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It's fine to copy / screen-capture directly from a source, in fact preferable to using a link, because in the long run, a great many links get deleted, or changed. – gosmond Feb 23 at 7:17
Can users who are not an administrator (and cannot run the App Store) get to the App Store to click the "Hide Update" button? – D.W. Feb 23 at 7:32
up vote 5 down vote

The best solution I've found for this so far has been to ⌥+'click' the notifications menu icon in the top right and disable notifications. This resets every day though.

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Where the heck did you get that from? (not saying the answers wrong, just Apple just have not implemented anything to do with the Mac App Store well at all) – Jonathan. Dec 30 '12 at 14:10
This disables all notifications, not just the Mac App Store ones. – TJ Luoma May 16 at 14:19
up vote 5 down vote

You can now simply go to System Preferences > Software Update, and turn off "Automatically Check for Updates."

No messing with firewalls, and just works with App Store. So just remember to check every now and then manually to find out when you have updates!

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This does not work on 10.8, can anyone confirm if this works on 10.8.1 or 10.8.2? – nylund Feb 5 at 9:05
up vote 2 down vote

It's located in:

System Preferences < Security and Privacy < Firewall < Firewall Options (you might have to activate this) < + < AppStore

Click the arrow on the right for a drop down to select "block all incoming connections" and I keep it like this until I decide it's time to update everything.

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This will block automatic updates entirely, not just hide the notification. Administrators should definitely not use this option, although it might be OK for OP. – Quantum7 Nov 22 '12 at 18:14
It's extreme, but it stops a bunch of problems (Apple sometimes spams your internet connection - I've had periods where Apple re-checks this state every 30 seconds, causing problems when you're trying to use your machine for anything CPU+b/w intensive (e.g. distributed builds). – Adam Dec 2 '12 at 19:12
up vote 2 down vote

I found that the preferences for the notification center are located in a sqlite database in ~/Library/Application Support/NotificationCenter/ The file is named with a GUID so I'm not sure if it's the same for every account, but it was the only file in the directory and has a .db extension. I used the following sql command

update app_info set flags = 134 where bundleid = 'com.apple.appstore'

I'm not 100% sure if it is working or not, but you can try it by running

sqlite3 ~/Library/Application\ Support/NotificationCenter/*.db "update app_info set flags = 134 where bundleid = 'com.apple.appstore'"

in a terminal.

Meaning of Flags

As suggested, here's what I was able to figure out about the flags value by modifying entries through System Preferences and observing the resulting change in flag value.

The flag value appears to be a bitmask of at least 16 bits as follows

|   |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |   | M |   | A | b | S | B | H |

The meanings of the fields are

M Set if the options have been modified from the default values
A Set if alerts should be shown for the application
b Set if banners should be shown for the application
S Set if "Play sound when receiving notifications" is checked
B Set if "Badge app icon" is checked
H Set if "Show in Notification Center" is unchecked

I was not able to find any meaning for the remaining fields. The value 134 is the original value that the appstore entry had (which was 150) but with the alert bit cleared. I thought one of the extra bits set on the appstore entry was the one that caused it to be hidden from the preference pane, but even after clearing them it did not show up.

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Do you have any documentation about this database, especially about the meaning of different values for the flags attribute? I would be rather reluctant to run this without a reference. – patrix♦ Mar 29 at 15:40
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@patrix Unfortunately there's no documentation, I just observed how the flags changed when I modified the alert style for other items and applied those changes to the entry for the appstore. I'll add some info on what I deduced to the answer. – Geoff Reedy Mar 29 at 16:12
up vote 0 down vote

Update: This doesn't work, the key appears to be ignored for some reason.

I think you might be able to change the default behavior of App Store.app by changing the NSUserNotificationAlertStyle plist entry from alert to banner. I just applied this change myself, but haven't been able to verify that it works because there haven't been any updates yet.

Here's what I did:

sudo nano /Applications/App\ Store.app/Contents/Info.plist

Find alert: ^w alert<

replace with banner and save ^x y

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You should be able to delete your own answers if they are invalid. – patrix♦ Feb 5 at 21:29

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