I dread ever having to run the Mac App Store to get an upgrade. (Luckily, I only have to do it for Xcode and OS X.)

It asks for my password literally every 15-20 seconds. Once I tell it to upgrade everything, it selects only one upgrade, and keeps telling me there are upgrades. While the upgrades are going, it keeps asking me for my password.

At that point I go off and watch TV. When I come back, it's actually downloaded all of the upgrades, and there's a message about how there are more. After I've entered my password a few more times, it tells me I'm up to date.

Then it asks me whether I'd like to upgrade.

I guess once their work experience students get bored working on Xcode they put them on this instead.

> It asks for my password literally every 15-20 seconds.

This hasn't been my experience at all. I wonder what's going on because that sounds super annoying.

As far as I can tell, it's not universal, but still somewhat common. (My computer has always done it ever since I bought it new in April.) It is a bit annoying. But since I use the MAS so irregularly, I can get by. I do wonder what the cause is, though. I'm less certain I'd like to know how Apple have so far failed to get to the bottom of it.

On OS X and iOS Apple’s developers tend to treat every network error as a reason to nag you to reauthenticate. I have opened bugs for this in almost every app they make and it's like playing whack-a-mole where they'll fix one instance in one app and then it'll show up in the major release or a similar function somewhere else.

Do you know for certain that they know about it? You can file bugs here: http://bugreport.apple.com/.

Radar is bullshit. Apple should make it easy to file bugs and get information about them but they've been using this piece of jank since forever. If I file a dupe I have to inquire about it every now and again because you can't just add me to the original? Yeah, I don't think so.

I've done my Radar time.

If the reason Apple haven't fixed this is that I personally didn't sign on to Radar and log it as a bug, I can live with that.

I've had the same issue. And yes, it's annoying. The MAS is frustrating at the best of times.

That's basically my experience as well. Now imagine that your connection is rather slow, which forces you to start larger updates before going to bed - I can't count the number of times I woke up to a password entry dialog and no download progress at all. It takes me ages to upgrade anything there since I really hate opening that app. With 1 Mbit/s connection even process of searching for updates will take a good minute.

> It asks for my password literally every 15-20 seconds.

That's really odd. It's a bad app but I've never seen that (in fact I've almost never need to enter my credentials). Are you sure it's your iTunes password? Maybe it's your keychain password and you have your keychain locked (which therefore you're going to be prompted for its password every time a service needs to grab the credentials stored within).

It's funny, too, that Apple feels there is enough development time to do things like implement completely non-standard UI components but not enough time to fix a growing list of real problems.

To this day, I click on things and assume my click just didn't "take" because nothing seems to be happening. Sometimes that's true, and other times it's because the Mac decided to display progress in the least obvious places.

Ironically the one thing that doesn't update cleanly through the App Store is the OS itself, even though I suspect that was Apple's main reason for creating all this. When El Capitán came out, at first I thought it wasn't even available because it wasn't structured as an "update" to anything (in direct contrast to the way every other upgrade works, including the minor 10.x.x updates!).

It's not structured as an update, and that's a good thing. This way, the update to 10.10 is treated as separate from the update to 10.11, meaning you can still download both should you need them.

Great point. The "updates" tab is a complete mindfk, you can't filter by OS version (which the app presumably knows, yet chooses to ignore) so you can spend lots of time investigating an app, only to find out at the last moment that you can't actually run it, and - a personal bugbear of mine - none of the text is proper selectable text, so it can't be copied.

And tell me I'm not the only person in the world who has to manage several Apple IDs ...

The one thing that keeps bothering me with MAS updates is that you cannot see the download/install progress. It will show it at first, but then the progress bar indicator simply disappears after a short time. I have to close the App Store window and reopen it, often multiple times, in order to be able to see the download progress again. This is not an issue for smaller updates, but larger Xcode updates are a pain trying to figure out how much data has been downloaded so far.

For some reason Xcode updates are shown in Launchpad (both the dock icon and if you can manage to find the app in Launchpad itself) and then sync'd back to the App Store after some delay. The delay seems to be completely random.

I think for some class of updates that includes Xcode and OS the App Store uses a separate tool to download and run the update so it has to use some sort of (very) delayed IPC mechanism. Regular apps update through the App Store itself so it shows progress immediately.

Try switching to the Purchases view, I've found that you can see the download/install progress better there.

The MAS is excruciatingly slow. Switching to each tab takes 7-10 seconds for me on my late '13 Macbook Pro Retina with a very fast internet connection. The tabs seem to work in a similar way in iTunes. You would think they could precache the other tabs after the current tab loads. Nope.

Indeed, I actually have a ridiculous and frustrating ongoing problem, apparently insoluble, where no matter how many times I update an app that appears under "Updates Available", it will reappear after seemingly successfully updating.

So I've installed the identical copies of XCode, iMovie, The Unarchiver, etc., etc., over and over. Then entries with identical versions and release dates very shortly after reappear in the list.

This, on top of countless other frustrations (such as transferring my MBP from my home "battlestation" to offsite causing full system crashes about 1/3 of the time, Time Machine not working properly with my NAS setup, WiFi overheating/malfunctioning FUBAR right after upgrading to Yostemite, various other minor random things breaking and annoyances, and so on, including the generally arrogant attitude Apple takes of its customers and developers), I've had enough. Next computer I'm running back into the arms of Linux, because the main argument against it is that Linux eats up a lot of time configuring, but I'm already wasting way too much time dealing with my OS' issues, one that ostensibly "just works", so I might as well get the benefit of having a working, productive development system at the end of it.

Every time I start MAS, softwareupdated goes from 30mb to about 500mb, without doing anything. When I close MAS it continues to steal that memory.

This is really it. It's so painful to use. Slow, buggy, and unreliable.

Frankly, the slowness of the Mac App Store and its connection in China is the starting reason that some Chinese developers seek Xcode outside the official channel, hence the XcodeGhost.