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I get this popup about once a day, but I don't know what "product" App Store is talking about.

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I tried going to Launchpad, but nothing seemed to be in the middle of downloading (no icon was greyed out). I have 14GB space free, so whatever it is, it would need to be pretty big. The biggest I could imagine would be xcode, but I already have that installed.

Is there a way to find out what this popup is referring to?

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    I've no idea how to tell which app it is, but double check your free space - see apple.stackexchange.com/a/370809/85275 for how & why that figure may be incorrect. Also, 14GB free space is really nowhere near enough for your drive to be able to work properly.
    – Tetsujin
    Commented Sep 25, 2019 at 6:51
  • I'd probably try removing some files with DaisyDisk the trial lets you scan. It doesn't let you remove files, but it's not a big deal because you can right-click a file and choose "Show in finder" and delete it from there. It just makes it super easy to find files/folders you don't need that are taking up a lot of space.
    – Joonas
    Commented Sep 25, 2019 at 8:07
  • I have to agree with @Tetsujin - 14GB of free space is dangerously low, even if your Mac has an awful lot of RAM. My personal recommendation is to have a minimum of 15% of your disk's capacity as free space. Obviously you can temporarily go below that, but generally speaking you'd want to stay above it. Don't forget your Mac will use drive space when it needs to user virtual memory, among other things.
    – Monomeeth ♦
    Commented Sep 25, 2019 at 10:48

1 Answer 1

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Check the "purgeable" space of your APFS disk with Disk Utilities. It seems Finder count this space in free space, but not App Store.

But you can trick macOS to clean up APFS by creating a huge garbage file, then deleting it.

You can create a huge file that will force macOS to clean purgeable files to free you space. In order to do so, type this command in a terminal:

dd if=/dev/zero of=~/hugefile bs=15m

It will create a file called hugefile in your home folder, which you can check the size with Get Info and stop when it's big enough for you, using ControlC. Or you can simply let it run until you are out of space in the disk and things start to stop working.

This command takes a long time to allocate the memory, you can also stop it when it's 5~10GB.

In practical, what I have done earlier is letting dd run for about 30 seconds, then killing it with ctrl+c, and deleting the file:

rm ~/hugefile

Hope this will help in your case too. Then App Store happily installed the update if it is trying to udpate.

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