The latest beta of macOS 15.1 brings a highly anticipated new feature: the ability to directly download apps from the Mac App Store to an external drive. This is great news for users with limited internal storage.
Mac App Store gains flexibility
With macOS Sequoia, already announced at WWDC 2024 and available in beta, Apple had relaxed the storage requirements for downloading apps from the Mac App Store. macOS 15.1 beta 3 goes even further by adding an option to automatically install apps larger than 1 GB to an external drive chosen by the user. Lighter apps will continue to be installed on the internal drive.
Additionally, the Mac App Store no longer requires twice the amount of free space as the app size. Instead, only the final size of the app, plus a small margin, will be required. This is a change that developers should take into account when specifying disk space requirements.
A relief for small SSDs
These developments will make Mac users with only 128GB or 256GB of storage happy. By installing large applications on an external drive, they will free up precious gigabytes on their internal SSD.
This is another step towards more flexible storage management on Macs, showing that Apple is listening to user feedback. It remains to be seen whether this option will be widely adopted, or whether most will still prefer the simplicity of an installation on the internal disk. In any case, it is an additional appreciated choice, for a more pleasant experience of the Mac App Store even though this store is very little used on Macs.