MacOS – How to get storedownloadd to stop

macossoftware-update

Judging by the Rcvd Bytes column in Activity Monitor, storedownloadd has been busy downloading. It downloaded 2GBytes while my computer was on today, and earlier this evening it downloaded 424.1MBytes.

I'm assuming this is macOS Sierra, but that's not terribly important – I just want it to stop! What options do I have to set to do this?

I've played with the App Store settings a bit:

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But this didn't seem to make any difference. I've rebooted, and softwaredownloadd is still downloading. 320MBytes now. Wait… how big is this thing?

(I'm reluctant to disable the automatic update check. I like to know when new updates are available. However I do insist on being allowed to schedule the download and installation myself.)

(Macbook Pro retina 13" early 2015, OS X El Capitan 10.11.6)

Best Answer

You could try to unload the daemon

sudo launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.storedownloadd.daemon.plist

Or the best thing to do is pause the updates in the App Store