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I have a 3 days old Macbook Pro 2015 with OS X Yosemite (10.10.5) on it.
Today (for the first time) a new update appeared in my Mac App Store, an update to an app (Sketch - that is not free) that I never purchased on my Apple ID account.

Mac App Store update

Also, since I bought the Macbook 3 days ago, I never logged in with any other Apple ID account neither did anybody else use my Macbook.
Now the interesting thing is that a Spotlight search finds this app.

Sketch in Spotlight

Therefore this means that it would be installed on my machine, right? But it doesn't show up in the Applications folder or in Launchpad. When I try to open it from Spotlight it does open for about half a second after which this pops up:

Old account pop up

This is an Apple ID (edited in the screenshot) that I used on another Macbook, when I was working for a company in 2014. I did indeed log in with both my account and this work account (that I no longer have access to) into the Mac App Store on that work Macbook.
Extra info: In System preferences -> App Store , I had Download newly available updates in the background checked. I unchecked it now.

Questions:

  1. How can I unlink (if it's linked somehow) my current Apple ID account from that work account I used in 2014? So that other updates from that work account won't show up in my Mac App Store. Also, I would like this app update to stop showing in my Mac App Store as well.
  2. As I understand, now I have that app installed somewhere on my machine, even though I can't find it on the system. How can I uninstall it?
  3. As I understand, somehow my Macbook downloaded and installed this app on my machine without any visual feedback to me possibly because I had that option checked in Mac App Store (that I mentioned above). Is this correct?

Note

This question might seem similar to Purchase from random account showing up in Mac App Store? but it's different in a way that I recognize the old account and also the app appears in my Spotlight search.

Update

Okay, this is strange. Didn't do anything and the update went away from the Mac App Store and also Spotlight can't find this app anymore. I guess I will leave the question here for 2-3 more days, in case somehow it comes back.

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  • When you had the issue, did you have any external drives plugged in, or mounted via the network?
    – Ashley
    Sep 10, 2015 at 19:55
  • @Ashley Actually there's a pretty good chance that I had my external hard drive plugged in. I remember using it in those days when it happened, to copy some of my old files on the new machine. How could that happen because of an external hard drive?
    – Alex
    Sep 10, 2015 at 21:02
  • Perhaps you have a copy of Sketch on the external hard drive somewhere? You could try plugging the drive back in and repeat the Spotlight search. If you see it, try asking Spotlight for the exact location (on 10.9, one way to do this is to move the mouse over the search result, then hold alt and cmd... sorry, I don't know how to do this on 10.10). So perhaps this might answer your questions 2 and 3. I don't know about question 1, sorry!
    – Ashley
    Sep 11, 2015 at 9:04

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