Looking for a MacUpdater replacement

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 hand-fed database what the latest version is, because live 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. Homebrew casks, and formulae too

3,263 app bundles can be matched safely through 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. Every one is verified against Homebrew’s checksum, or, where the vendor publishes none, against the developer signature already on the installed copy. Homebrew itself is not required for any of that. If you do run it, Floodtide adds a pane listing every cask, formula and tap it has installed, and upgrades them through brew rather than around it.

3. GitHub Releases and Electron feeds

Apps that publish neither an appcast nor a cask often still cut releases on GitHub or ship an Electron update feed. Floodtide reads both, picks a single unambiguous Mac build instead of guessing between several, and checks the SHA-512 an Electron feed publishes before anything is installed.

4. A signed catalog, and any source you set

For the rest, Floodtide keeps a small signed catalog that only names which source to read for an app, so the reading goes back through the sources above. You can also point an app at a Sparkle URL or a GitHub repository yourself, and that choice is checked ahead of anything Floodtide finds on its own.

Anything else stays visible

Mac App Store apps update in place, inside Floodtide, with no App Store window and no password; only a title too large to be worth installing here, an iPhone or iPad app, or an account you are signed out of is handed back to the store. Apps Setapp or Microsoft AutoUpdate manage are named as theirs rather than touched, and apps no source can resolve are labelled uncovered, never silently dropped and never paired with a guessed download. One click can send an anonymous coverage request so the missing apps can be prioritised.

1. Download Floodtide and open it. There is no account and no import step.
2. It scans your Applications folders and lists what is behind, grouped by what needs a decision from you and what does not.
3. Press Update All. By default downloads run several at a time with real progress, and anything macOS guards asks for your password once for the whole batch; Update one app at a time, in Settings, trades that for less disk space.
4. 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.