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.
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.
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.
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 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.