Looking for a MacUpdater replacement
MacUpdater stopped selling and supporting on 1 January 2026, and CoreCode has said its update database goes offline on 31 December 2026. Floodtide is built so that particular failure cannot happen again.
The database is the whole story
MacUpdater worked by keeping a catalogue of roughly 100,000 Mac applications and checking, by hand and by crawler, what the current version of each one was. That catalogue was the product. It was also a permanent daily cost that a one-time purchase cannot fund forever, and its developers said as much when they closed: they had failed to build a sustainable pricing model, and the app needed too much daily maintenance for a small team.
Floodtide takes the opposite approach. It never asks a central database what the latest version is, because three sources already know and maintain themselves:
1. The app tells us itself
Most independent Mac apps ship a Sparkle update feed, and the address of that feed is written inside the app bundle. Floodtide reads it and asks the developer directly. That answer is authoritative and current the second a release ships, and nobody has to curate anything.
2. The Homebrew catalog
7,482 Mac applications are indexed by Homebrew, maintained continuously by thousands of contributors as part of infrastructure that millions of developers already depend on. Floodtide matches your installed apps against it and pulls each vendor’s official download, verified against the checksum the catalogue publishes.
3. A deliberately small curated list
A few apps use neither. Those get an entry in Floodtide’s own chart, which stays small on purpose and grows only from real requests: one click inside the app nominates something it could not cover. That is the opposite of a 100,000-entry treadmill.
Moving across
- Download Floodtide and open it. There is no account and no import step.
- It scans your Applications folders and lists what is behind, grouped by what needs a decision from you and what does not.
- Press Update All. Downloads run several at a time with real progress, and anything macOS guards asks for your password once for the whole batch.
- Keep MacUpdater installed as long as you like. Nothing conflicts; Floodtide never touches its data.
Every update keeps the previous version for seven days, so Undo Last Update is always one click away, and each replacement is checked against the signature of the app it replaces before Floodtide considers the job done.
Common questions
Is MacUpdater still usable?
Version 3.5 was released free of charge and still runs, but sales and support ended on 1 January 2026 and CoreCode has said the update database server will be switched off on 31 December 2026. After that date it can no longer tell you what is outdated.
Why did MacUpdater shut down?
Its developers said the one-time pricing model could not sustain the work. The product depended on a hand-maintained database of roughly 100,000 applications that needed daily verification, which is a permanent cost that a single sale does not cover.
What makes Floodtide different?
Floodtide does not maintain an app database. It reads the Sparkle update feed published inside each app bundle, matches other apps against the community-maintained Homebrew catalog, and keeps only a small curated list for the few apps neither source covers. Those sources maintain themselves, so the cost that closed MacUpdater does not exist.
Can Floodtide import my MacUpdater settings?
There is nothing to import. Floodtide scans your Applications folders on first launch and works out what is installed and what is outdated by itself, usually in under ten seconds.
How much does Floodtide cost?
It is £19.99 once, covering three Macs, with a 14-day full trial and no subscription. Every 1.x update is included, and if a major version ever ships as a paid upgrade, existing owners get it at half price.