For five years I’ve used the free random password generator app PSWD from the Mac App Store, and I’ve been happy with it. Since I first installed the app, the developer released a number of minor updates, the last in July 2023, three years ago. This was fine, because the app was essentially perfect for my purpose, so I didn’t need the app to change. A few days ago, however, the developer released a major update: PSWD 5.0 is a complete rewrite. Everything is new
Among the changes in PSWD 5.0 was this one:
A unified user interface on Mac, iPhone and iPad
On social media, the developer mentioned that all of the code in PSWD 5.0 was written by Claude, the LLM from Anthropic.
The purpose of this blog post is not to criticize the developer of PSWD. I thank the developer for creating the app, and I can’t complain about a free product. I simply want to avoid installing the version 5.0 update. I prefer to stick with version 4.1 indefinitely. I can and will complain about the App Store app, on the other hand, which I don’t consider to be a free product, because it’s a built-in component of my expensive Mac. By the way, I don’t consider Google Chrome to be a totally free product either: we pay for it via the lucrative advertisement surveillance economy.
The PSWD 5.0 update appears in the Updates section of the App Store app. Although you can hide and unhide apps in your App Store purchase list, it turns out that hiding an app in the App Store purchase list does not hide the app in the updates list! I honestly can’t figure out the benefit of hiding an app in the App Store. The list of your purchased apps—a misnomer, as the list includes free apps—is practically unusable anyway: you can neither sort nor search the list. Maddeningly, the Mac App Store sorts your purchased apps by date of first install rather than by name, so it’s difficult even to scan the list manually to find a specific app.
You can clear the Updates list in the Mac App Store by deleting some cache files on disk, but that’s at best a momentary solution. The unwanted update will return eventually, or immediately if you use the Reload Page (⌘R) command.
A more lasting solution is, counterintuitively, to install the update. The trick is that you can keep more than one copy of a Mac App Store app on disk. I used the Compress command in Finder to create a zip
archive of PSWD 4.1, including the embedded Mac App Store receipt file (/Applications/PSWD.app/Contents/_MASReceipt/receipt
). Then I updated /Applications/PSWD.app
to version 5.0. Afterward, I unzipped version 4.1 into another folder on disk; it works to use a subfolder of the /Applications
folder. Finally, I dragged PSWD 4.1 into my Dock.
Both 4.1 and 5.0 are installed on disk. The Mac App Store sees version 5.0 and thus considers the app up to date, so nothing appears in the Updates list. The Dock refers to version 4.1 when I click to open. The Mac App Store (using the Launch Services framework) looks for apps on disk by bundle identifier (CFBundleIdentifier
in /Applications/PSWD.app/Contents/Info.plist
) rather than by name, so you can actually rename one or both of the apps for ease of identification in Spotlight. Alfred app helpfully shows the full file path of an app in its search results.
A downside of this trick to hide an update in the Mac App Store is that you will still see future updates to the app. Nonetheless, an occasional update notice is much better than a constant update notice. You can make the new update notice go away by installing the update, which should affect only the newer copy of the app on disk, leaving your older copy alone.
Needless to say, none of this is possible on iOS, with no direct file system access. But yeah, tell me again how App Store lockdown is for the benefit of users…