For the past day the Mac App Store has hung on the “Updates” tab with a “Checking for updates…” message in the top right corner. The version of the OS was Mac OS X 10.10.3, and I’m using a MacBook Pro (Retina, Mid 2012) laptop.

I tried (in this order):

  • restarting the App Store App
  • restarting the computer
  • repairing disk permissions from the normal partition
  • restarting while holding option to boot from the recovery partition, and then again “Repair Disk Permissions” and “Repair Disk”
  • reseting the PRAM
  • reseting the SMC

None of these tricks worked. Then, I found this gem of a solution!

In brief, to fix a hanging Mac App Store, run the software update from the command line using this command:

sudo softwareupdate -i -a

Issuing the above command installed the Mac OS X Command Line Tools update and the Mac OS X 10.10.4 update for me. After restarting my computer, I could then install the remaining third party updates.