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I've pressed the "Update" button in the Mac App Store to install a new version of Xcode.

The Mac App Store itself shows no visible download progress or error messages, but the circle is almost complete:

Xcode circle almost complete

Hovering on Launchpad's dock icon shows the ongoing Mac App Store download progress. Now that the download has completed it is showing "Launchpad Installing".

Launchpad Installing

Launchpad Downloading - 100.0 MB of 12.39 GB
Launchpad Installing

It's been stuck in this state for quite some time.

I'm currently using Xcode, which is open. I have had various Xcode betas installed, in addition to the Mac App Store version. The latest Xcode RC was simply titled "Xcode.app" and overwrote the version from the Mac App Store in my Applications directory.

As I'm typing this, the "Installing" seems to have finally failed. It has begun downloading the entire 12.39 GB update again.

Why is the Mac App Store download stuck at "Installing"? How can I get this update to actually install?

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    Hmmm happened to me on Monterey 12.0, updated, installed weird so I had two Xcodes, so I uninstalled them both because frankly I don't use them. Kudos on actually asking the question
    – Peter Nielsen
    Commented Dec 20, 2021 at 22:16

6 Answers 6

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29

I just went through this. It does install, it just takes an obscene amount of time. Over 1 hour for me on an M1 macbook pro. It gets to 80% and stops downloading and starts using high cpu usage with a process "installd". Then it gets to 99% and the CPU usage is gone but it takes another 20 minutes to finish the install.

You can open the app "Console", start the logging, and search the logs for the process "App Store" to see detailed install percentages.

enter image description here

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    This is the best answer. Before I saw this answer I kept aborting after 2 or 3 hours of it sitting at what looked like it was complete. Once I realized I could see the % complete in the console it made me confident that if I waited long enough it would complete, and it did. It did take stupidly long though... maybe 5 hours?
    – Jackson
    Commented Oct 31, 2021 at 2:06
  • This is very helpful, thank you.
    – Cristian Moisei
    Commented Jun 4, 2023 at 8:03
  • I have the opposite experience. It downloaded and installed to 96.5% and then it just stuck there at full CPU. After an hour or two it stopped producing log messages and started downloading the entire 8 GB again. This install system is far from impressive, and using Appstore to install Xcode still seems like a mistake in 2023.
    – Andreas
    Commented Jun 28, 2023 at 18:16
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I had this same issue myself today.

I was able to resolve the issue with the following steps:

  • Move Xcode.app from my Applications folder to my Bin
  • Force Quit the appstoreagent background process from Activity Monitor
    • This causes the Mac App Store to stop all in-progress updates, and it recognises I've removed the program.
  • Reinstall Xcode from the App Store normally
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  • This is what I ended up doing as well: move existing Xcode to the trash. I didn't quit the process but that might have sped things up.
    – pkamb
    Commented Sep 21, 2021 at 22:25
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I suggest ditching the App Store version and going instead with the direct download from https://developer.apple.com/download/all/

Once you have the Xcode.xip file, pop open a Terminal and decompress it using the command below (instead of double-clicking with Finder.app, which is slower):

xip -x Xcode.xip

Next delete the old Xcode.app first before trying to drag the new one to /Applications. This avoids the delay while Finder tries to calculate the diff of which hundreds of thousands of files may be overwritten, so will save considerable time.

Also of note, there is a tool called unxip (GitHub link) which claims to decompress Xcode 200-300% faster than the native xip tool.

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  • I run into this issue nearly every time I try to update Xcode via the App Store app. Installing via .xip seems to be the only reliable way.
    – Greg Brown
    Commented Dec 14, 2022 at 14:01
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If you're an M1 user and this happens make sure you're plugged into your power adapter. I had this same issue until I plugged in.

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    I was stuck at 91% for hours and couldn't try your tip because I was already plugged. So I unplugged and plugged again, and voila installation completed!
    – yairchu
    Commented Jul 31, 2022 at 10:57
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After seeing Qwertie's answer above, I looked a bit more in the console log and saw the following entry:

503:com.apple.appstored.Sbsync:E1475B:[
    {name: ThermalPolicy,
     policyWeight: 5.000,
     response: {
         Decision: Absolutely Must Not Proceed, 
         Score: 0.00, Rationale: [{thermalLevel >= 1}]
     }
    }
], FinalDecision: Absolutely Must Not Proceed}

After pulling out the external monitor, i.e making my Mac a bit cooler, it finished in a minute after having been stuck at part 979 for a long time.

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    Unreal. So it just sits there idle until the mac cools down? That would explain why it seemed to do nothing for 20 minutes after the CPU usage was gone.
    – Qwertie
    Commented Feb 8, 2022 at 3:20
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This was also happening to me on MacOS Ventura. Console with process "App Store" read a progress of 0.981, where it was frozen. Stopping Time Machine and ejecting the external volume seems to have fixed the issue, although it could've been coincidental since I didn't see any logs that indicated Time Machine was the culprit.

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