Blackcap Blog

Published at 20:25 on 20 September 2016

If you ever install Flash, there it will be. A stupid updater process that pops up and runs whenever you least want such a thing to run, typically when your computer is already busy and slow. And the Adobe Updater is itself a booger-eating fat pig that will pork up resources and make your computer run even slower.

There’s no instructions from Adobe on how to remove it. Of course not; they have delusions of grandeur: they think their software is so important that its updater is more important than you are. In fact, they think it’s about the most important thing there is. Definitely more important than Apple’s own update checks, which manage to run unobtrusively and generally when you’re not using the computer much.

Thankfully, it’s easy enough to remove the darned thing. Just open a shell window and type the following commands:

cd ~/Library/LaunchAgents
launchctl remove `basename com.adobe.ARM.* .plist`
rm com.adobe.ARM.*

Et voilà! The Adobe Updater virus program should no longer run itself automatically.

Not to belabor the obvious, but if you choose to do this, it becomes your responsibility to check for and install updates. And with Flash, that’s important, because Flash security fixes come out all the time.

Thanks to the Life of a Computer Scientist blog for coming up with the solution and posting it.