Wednesday 29 October 2008

Stopping all OSX Google background 'updater' apps

Once you install Google software you get lumbered with various 'updater' daemons running on your machine. If you want to stop 'em running the Google way then you're obliged to uninstall all Google apps... However there always another way... Here are all the offending processes listed by process name as seen in Activity monitor:
  • "Google Updater Helper" - Firstly started by /Library/Preferences/loginwindow.plist (from here) and subsequently by launchd - (seen by running launchctl list | grep com.google.Updater.helper) - more info on startup from Apple.
    Removal: edit/remove the google item in that file using property editor/textedit/Pacifist
  • "googleml-modwatch" - Started by launchd from: /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.google.GoogleML.plist.
    Removal: rename com.google.GoogleML.plist to com.google.GoogleML.plist.off e.g.:
    sudo mv /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.google.GoogleML.plist /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.google.GoogleML.plist.off
  • "GoogleSoftwareUpdateDaemon" - another launchd startup
    Removal: sudo mv /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.google.keystone.daemon.plist /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.google.keystone.daemon.plist.off
  • "GoogleSoftwareUpdateAgent" - another launchd startup
    Removal: sudo mv /Library/LaunchAgents/com.google.keystone.agent.plist /Library/LaunchAgents/com.google.keystone.agent.plist.off

Then Restart and they should all be gone.... You can still manually run the updates when you want to by running:"/Library/Google/Google Updater/Google Updater.app".

2 comments:

  1. -Very helpful. Thank you.

    I found that the google updater apps crept back in (to be precise, alerts warning that they werent approved in the kid's accounts came back) after picasa updated itself. I've used chmod to remove rw access to the LaunchDaemons and LaunchAgents entries to see if that works. The files are there, merely inaccessible.

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  2. Thanks! I think I've exorcised the daemons at last.

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