Latest OS X Mountain Lion developer preview has iOS-style automatic app downloads

21 May, 2012 - Paul Dixon
Mountain Lion automatic downloads

Have you enabled Automatic Downloads on your iOS devices? It’s a handy little option introduced with iOS 5, that allows apps, books, or music purchased on one device to be automatically downloaded to others signed into the same account. It would appear that Apple are also bringing the feature to the Mac App Store in the next version of OS X.

High School Student Zach Kahn, who describes himself has a “verified Apple fanatic”, discovered the option in the latest developer preview of OS X Mountain Lion, and posted screenshots of it (including the one above) on Twitter.

Apparently, the feature still needs some work though. Although you can choose to enable automatic downloads in the Mac App Store, apps purchased on one Mac don’t actually install on others yet – despite the fact that they show as being installed when viewed from the App Store.

Apple has already revealed that OS X Mountain Lion will be released this Summer, we should learn more about it at next month’s Worldwide Developers Conference.

[Via 9to5Mac]

About the author

Paul Dixon is the owner of Macsessed. He lives in Lancashire in the UK where he works as a web designer. You can find him on and Twitter.