How do I transfer ownership of electron-based applications from one user account to another on a Mac?

Question

I read somewhere that for security purposes it's a good practice to not use your the admin account for your your day to day activities on your computer, but instead create a separate account that doesn't have root access.

I'm using a Mac so not sure it's as important, but I would still like to reduce risk as much as possible from malware, so I have followed this practice.

The problem I have is that I am now bombarded with update requests from electron-based applications that require me to enter my admin credentials every time in order to update (Slack, Skype, Linear etc.) - I have pasted an example below.

I have been told that there is a way to transfer ownership of these to the secondary account so that the updates would then happen automatically, but I have not established how to do this and would be very grateful for some help.

Someone in customer support for Linear attempted to help me with this and advised me to run the following command in Terminal (from the admin account):

sudo chown -R $(whoami):$(id -gn) /Applications/Linear.app

However, ultimately this did not do the trick, so I assume there is another version of this command that might work, which I could apply to each application that is doing this?

Answer 1

Installing a helper tool or writing to the /Applications folder requires an admin user account.

An admin account should be able to update the app itself without a password; but installing the helper tool will still require authorisation.

You can't "transfer ownership of the app" to a Standard User. Well, you can, but updating the app will still require an admin accounts.

You can't really do anything without upgrading your standard user account to an admin account.