Apple Core Rot Remains in App Store : OS X Sporadically Fails to Update Apps

Apple Core Rot now extends its tentacles into the OS X software updater: if the software update mechanism itself is unreliable, can anything else be trusted?

Back in October, I wrote Apple Core Rot now featured in App Store : OS X Cannot Update Itself Properly. For that, I had do do a complete reinstall of El Capitan.

Well it turns out that the App Store remains broken at times on my MacBook Pro Retina: it won’t update any of the iWork apps, or XCode. Clicking Update for any app results in “Waiting”, then that disappears and nothing happens. No download, no install, nothing (no network activity at all). Click, click, click, ad nauseum—nothing. Tried it for 10 minutes without satisfaction.

Finally the God of Bugs relented after a while, and the App Store functioned and update the apps.

It appears to me that there was some kind of transient problem, but the App Store app doesn’t bother with niceties like reporting errors, nor does it bother to write anything to the system log. Apple Core Rot is alive and well.

This type of thing along with negligent Apple security planning is not acceptable for a gazillion dollar company, or even a billion dollar one. SpamSieve author Michael Tsai writes No One Minding the Store. It seems that Apple Core Rot is rampant in every area of the Apple franchise except perhaps hardware—though pro users might argue strongly that the dumbing-down of the Mac Pro and MacMini is of the same nature.