App Store download stuck preparing to download

[Morac]

I have an App that is stuck "preparing to download" in the App Store and the Apps folder thing in the dock shows "Waiting". I deleted the App and restarted and it was still there. I tried booting into Recovery mode and then restarted and when I did so I got a message that the App couldn't be downloaded and to try again. I did so, but it got stuck again near the end. I tried cancelling the download from in the App Store, but that didn't work and now it's stuck in "preparing to download" again with no way to get rid of it.

In prior versions of MacOS I'd go into LaunchPad, press the option button and click the "X" to cancel it there, but that's not possible in macOS Tahoe 26.0 even though there is still a "Waiting" indicator on the new "Apps" which replaced Launchpad.

What's odd is I found the version it's trying to download in Time Machine and restored it, so now the app is installed and working, but the App Store is still showing a spinning circle with "preparing to download".

I can't find any way of aborting this download. Anyone have any ideas how?

 

[Morac]

In case anyone has the same problem, here's how I solved this.

1. Force quit appstoreagent process
2. Trash the ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.appstoreagent folder
3. Open the App Store and showed the stuck App was no longer trying to download.
4. Logged out and back in cleared the "Waiting" status from the App folder in the dock.

This clears out the Update history, but everything else works fine.

This doesn't fix the problem with not being able to download the app, but I think there's something wrong with it in the store and I don't need it, so I'm find just not downloading it.

Of note, if you delete any previously installed App from Finder after this and then try to remove it from Trash it will give a permission error. You can either remove it from the list of purchased apps in the App Store or do a “sudo rm -rf app name” in the ~/.trash folder.