Mac – Certain apps not updating on Mac App Store with “temporarily unavailable” and “could not complete your request”

I seem to have fixed the problem.

I used opensnoop to follow all file accesses while the app store was running. I spotted that ~/Library/Cookies/com.apple.appstore.plist was being accessed - this file had not been deleted by Safari when I cleared all cookies! The file had incorrect permissions - I deleted it. Now the App Store seems to be working again.

Opensnoop is a great tool!

This is caused by a Mac AppStore Receipt residing somewhere on your system that was issued for different account. Spotlight is generally of no use in finding these, since it can't go deep enough to find them within the places they are. Usually the offending receipt can be located with a simple command, that may have to be adjusted according to your file system structure.

Open Terminal and try:

cd /

then

find . -type f -name "receipt" -exec grep -s -R -n -i "com.ensenasoft" {} \;

• Press Control - C to cancel/stop

if located you will should see something such as:

Binary file Applications/Mahjong Deluxe Free.app/Contents/_MASReceipt/receipt matches

If it failed to locate anything you will need to adjust the path, for example to search a different volume:

cd /Volumes/<Name of Volume>

then try the command again.