2013-08-02
I've been struggling with the Mac AppStore "You have updates available for other accounts" issue for a while now. There is a long discussion Apple Community forums and there does not appear to be a straightforward answer other than Spotlight is culprite.
The standard fix is to:
reset file permissions by opening Disk Utility, selecting the
boot drive (Macintosh HD in my case) and perform the "Repair Disk Permissions"
Open the Spotlight System Preferences pane, select the Privacy tab, then add your HD to the list (either drag in there or use the "+" button). Then proceed to remove it from the list via the "-" button. This is supposed to cause the Spotlight index to be rebuilt.
Unfortunately, this procedure has never worked for myself, mainly because during the second step I get a Privacy Error telling me that Privacy List Error The item couldn't be addred because you don't have the appropriate permissions. WTF? That's exactly what I said too.
Fortunately, the quick fix for this issue is to simply delete the application you want to update from your Applications folder and then run the update for for the application in the Appstore. The Appstore will then download and install the application. But this is a pain in the ass and doesn't really solve the problem.
In the process of figuring out what that meant I found this discussion on
how to reset/restart Spotlight indexing??.
This outlines using mdutil which is a commandline tool for "manage the metadata stores used by Spotlight".
The first instruction is to run the following command, which for me resulted in the error shown:
... sudo mdutil -i on /
Spotlight server is disabled.
Ok, so Spotlight is not working at all it seems. Now what? Well, futher in the discussion the following is suggested:
... cd /System/Library/LaunchDaemons
... sudo launchctl load -w com.apple.metadata.mds.plist
Now, running sudo mdutil -i on / works and Spotlight appears to be reindexing my system. mds
and a couple of mdworker processes are now burning up most of my CPU. Let's wait and see what
happens...
Apparently so. Opening up the Appstore an running an update now works and the mds process is
running on boot.
I did note 2 applications (Dash and Evernote) did not update and gave the same other account error. With these I had to go the route of deleting and reinstalling. I will have to monitor these two apps for future updates and see if the problem persists for them.
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