Pending Update of Snap Store

What's with 'Pending Update of Snap Store?'

4 Answers

There are a couple things happening.

First, let's talk about the EASIEST way to make the notification go away:

1. Quit the application (in this case, snap-store [a.k.a. Ubuntu Software]). You might not recall that you have it open, but you do. Maybe it's minimized. Find it and Quit the application.
2. Run sudo snap refresh. Let the command complete.
3. Re-launch your application.

Second, let's talk about WHY it's happening:

Snapd detects when a new version is available. If the application is currently running, snapd will inhibit updating that application for up to 14 days.

With most applications, this works fine. You Quit out of an application, a few hours later snapd updates the application (it checks several times each day). and the next time you open the application you don't even notice that it's been updated. Great!

But some applications are open for a long time that runs up against that 14-day window. Like web browsers on laptops that get closed/suspended instead of quit/restarted. Unfortunately, when the 14-day window expires, snapd will kill the application in order to implement the upgrade. To the user, this looks like Firefox crashed unexpectedly, losing whatever they were doing.

• Snapd MUST refresh snaps. That's a legacy of the original design; snaps were originally designed for phones and IOT devices that MUST work reliably and MUST update reliably without user input. You can disable it if you know how...but it's a bad idea for must users -- disabling updates means no security patches and insecure applications.

Third, let's talk about why you are suddenly getting these notifications NOW.

The Snap developers were dissatisfied with those two choices (kill the application to force the upgrade -or- disable upgrades), so they created a better path: Remind the user to Quit the application. That is the notification the you are seeing. It's new (turned on by default) in Ubuntu 22.04.

• If you ignore it, then when the countdown reaches zero snapd will terminate the application and refresh automatically.

Finally, there's one obvious question remaining: Why doesn't snapd download the update before nagging you?

Well, that's a work in progress. The snapd developers welcome code contributions to help make that happen safely. Snapd is Open Source.

Works for me:

1. Kill "snap" at System Monitor
2. sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade
3. sudo snap refresh

Close all apps in your Ubuntu. Open Ubuntu Software app, under updates section, update the apps one by one. This trick worked for me.

# Close all open `snapd` process
sudo killall -s KILL snapd
sudo snap refresh