Mac desktop says “Unable to download App” but the App is downloaded on the iOS device?

Question

My desktop is now running MacOS 11.1 (Big Sur). I also have several iOS machines.

On my iPhone I successfully downloaded the iOS Axos app. On my desktop, I am now seeing this error:

This is confusing, because I did not attempt to download the app on the desktop, there is no Axos app for the desktop, the App Store says nothing about Axos, and I see no error on my iOS device (which successfully downloaded the Axos app.)

Any thoughts on how to clear this?

Answer 1

I'm on macOS 11.3 Beta (20E5172i) and have the same issue. I've bought an app on my iPhone and my MacBook appears to subsequently try to download that app. I get these messages whenever I download a new app on my iPhone.

I found this setting in the macOS App Store Preferences and disabled the automatic app download, but don't know yet if this fixes the issue.

Answer 2

For me, this was caused by a slightly overly aggressive disk cleanup tool (CleanMyMac). After cleaning up, the app store's cache was missing, but the app store kept trying to update, causing an error visible in the Console app.

The fix was to quit the app store and restart.

First attempt to update failed, but it worked on the 2nd try and I could see a new cache was created in: /Users/jsumner/Library/Containers/com.apple.AppStore/Data/Library/Caches/com.apple.AppStore/Cache.db