Determining the source of a notification.

By Khomus, 23 March, 2026

Forum
macOS and Mac Apps

Hi all.

Periodically, for the last day or two, I'm getting the following notification popping up.

"Software Update, Close Apps Before Scheduled Update, Some apps may prevent your Mac from installing the software update later. Make sure you save documents and quit any open apps when you’re done for the day."

Interacting with this doesn't tell me anything useful. I thought it might be the OS but that's up to date, 26.3.1.

How do I find out what's triggering this so I can either update the software or stop it? It's possible it's Steam but I don't readily see a way to update Steam from within Steam. You'd think most other apps would be taken care of by whatever updates apps.

I just updated Mona so we'll see if that fixed it. But it would probably be useful to know how to determine what's doing it in the future, if it was Mona this time.

Options

Comments

By Tyler on Monday, March 23, 2026 - 07:55

Member of the AppleVis Editorial Team

My guess is that it's trying to install the background security improvement that was released last week. You can install it manually by going to System Settings > Privacy & Security > Background security improvements, and clicking Install. After the update is installed, your macOS version should be 26.3.1 (a).

HTH

By Levi Gobin on Monday, March 23, 2026 - 08:24

Member of the AppleVis Editorial Team

It’s basically saying for it to update at night, close any apps and documents which might prevent the Mac from restarting.
It has nothing to do with third-party apps.

By Khomus on Monday, March 23, 2026 - 19:04

I did assume it was the OS, I only asked about third party apps because software updates was telling me I was already up to date. Really the security stuff should just be in there, Esp. since it's updating the OS version. I generally shut my Mac down when I go to bed so it's not running on its own.

I did try just letting it go to sleep for a while but didn't like it, for some reason or another I can't quite remember right now. So I turned that off.