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You are here: Home / Tips and Tricks / How To Turn Off Catalina Update Notifications (Prompts & Badges)

How To Turn Off Catalina Update Notifications (Prompts & Badges)

Last updated on October 27, 2019 By Serhat Kurt 14 Comments

This short tip teaches you how you can disable Catalina upgrade notifications in the System Preference’s Dock icon and the ‘Upgrade Now’ prompt in the Software Update pane in macOS. You may want to do so, if you are not ready for the upgrade (such as Catalina compatibility issues etc) and if the notifications annoy you. These are just a few reasons why you’d want to stop macOS Catalina from showing up in Software Updates on your Mac. Since you want to disable this, you also would not want to see the red notification bubbles indicating that you have updates available. Do you also want to turn off upgrade notification badges in the dock? Then this article is for you.

How to Disable Update Notification in Software Update

Catalina update notification

This is very easy to do:

Please follow the steps:

1. Close the System Preferences app.

2. Open the Terminal app (Applications / Utilities; or you may use Spotlight)

3. Enter the following command and press enter. You may have to enter your password.

sudo softwareupdate --ignore "macOS Catalina"

4. Catalina Upgrade notice will disappear now. You will see the when you open System Preferences (Apple menu > System Preferences > Software Update)

However, you may want to undo this later when you are ready to upgrade. You can do so easily as well. Here is how:

1. Again open the Terminal app.

2. And enter the following command and hit enter (again you may have to enter your password):

sudo softwareupdate --reset-ignored

This will make Catalina Upgrade appear again.

How to disable Catalina Update Badge Notifications (the red bubble icon) in the dock

Settings Update Badge

1. Open the Terminal app.

2. Enter the following command and hit enter

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences AttentionPrefBundleIDs 0

3. Now you will need to restart the dock by entering the following command in the Terminal and pressing enter:

killall Dock

4. The dock will restart and you will not see the notifications badges.

See also: Notifications Disappearing From Lock Screen? Fix

Filed Under: Tips and Tricks Tagged With: Notifications

Comments

  1. Ashley says

    June 18, 2020 at 7:57 pm

    Hmm. It did work under Mohave until I installed the latest security update.
    Now I get the message:
    Ignoring software updates is deprecated.
    The ability to ignore individual updates will be removed in a future release of macOS.

    Awesome

    Reply
    • Flipflopmojo says

      July 22, 2020 at 6:09 pm

      Same happened to me. So we simply can’t ignore their constant nagging to update?

      Reply
  2. Doug Joseph says

    June 12, 2020 at 5:28 am

    As of 10.14.6 the command has been deprecated and no longer works. One can, it seems, click into System Preferences, Software Update, Advanced, and make sure to uncheck “Install macOS updates.”

    Reply
  3. Ana says

    May 17, 2020 at 6:28 pm

    THANK YOU! the notification was driving me crazy, it wouldnt go away even after I installed the software.

    Reply
  4. Maca says

    April 27, 2020 at 2:05 pm

    Wooow! thank you!

    Reply
  5. Craig says

    March 15, 2020 at 6:01 pm

    This worked for me to remove reminder for update but the red notification badge comes back after rebooting or when another check is made.
    You can run killall dock again but it doesn’t apply permanently 🙁

    Reply
    • Steve says

      April 6, 2020 at 10:28 am

      Same issue here! 🙁

      Reply
  6. Coby Randal says

    March 11, 2020 at 4:56 am

    Thanks for sharing this. I downgraded from Mojave back to High Sierra because I wanted CUDA drivers for my Nvidia card to work and I want / need some old drivers (some of which are 32bit). This is super.

    Reply
  7. Matt says

    January 12, 2020 at 11:22 pm

    Type “sudo -i” (no quotes) into a terminal before entering and other commands. Password will only be asked for once. You will be SU for the whole term of the terminal session. You can make this permanent so terminal defaults to this by opening terminal preferences, shell and typing it into the startup, run command. Make sure you tick the run inside shell box.

    Reply
  8. god says

    December 13, 2019 at 6:15 am

    You are god

    Reply
  9. Nikki says

    December 11, 2019 at 6:21 am

    Like Michael, Terminal won’t accept my password either. I followed all steps in “How to Disable Update Notification in Software Update”: entered
    sudo softwareupdate –ignore “macOS Catalina” in Terminal, hit enter, it asked for my password, entered it + hit enter, it said “wrong password, try again”. Retried 2x more, it said “password entered incorrect 3 times” so stopped there.
    What to do now? I don’t want to update my OS + the reminder banner is driving me nuts!

    Reply
  10. Peter says

    November 8, 2019 at 6:51 pm

    This worked brilliantly at first. Since recent update, I no longer get notified to update to Catalina, but the notification badge appears as soon as it checks for an update.

    Reply
  11. kamut rousson says

    November 5, 2019 at 11:38 pm

    hey michael, in the terminal at a sudo password prompt, the typed characters don’t appear, but they do get registered. only when you hit return will it report if the password is correct or not. if that’s not your problem, please provide a bit more details about what you’re doing, expecting, and seeing.

    Reply
  12. Michael says

    October 30, 2019 at 7:56 pm

    I tried this but Terminal won’t let me enter my password. Is there a way around this?

    Reply

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