You can make a difference in the Apple Support Community!

When you sign up with your Apple Account, you can provide valuable feedback to other community members by upvoting helpful replies and User Tips.

Looks like no one’s replied in a while. To start the conversation again, simply ask a new question.

FirePhantom Author

Level 1

11 points

Apps not recognised as installed by App Store or findable by Spotlight following Migration Assistant?

I installed macOS on a new SSD in my MBP and during setup I used Migration Assistant with a Time Machine backup (because it wouldn't let me do a full Time Machine restore).

Most things seem to be back to normal except that Spotlight is not finding some apps that I definitely have installed (like Pages, MS Word, Xcode, etc) and the App Store doesn't realise that these apps are already installed.

It only seems to be an issue with apps that I got through the App Store. Apps I downloaded through Adobe Creative Cloud like Illustrator, InDesign, and Photoshop both show up in Spotlight and work fine.

What do I do? How do I fix this?

MacBook Pro 15″, macOS 11.2

Posted on Apr 13, 2021 5:02 AM

Top-ranking reply

Luis Sequeira1

Level 9

67,558 points

Posted on Apr 13, 2021 5:40 AM

Try resetting Spotlight.

System Preferences->Spotlight, click Privacy, and drag your drive to the list.

Quit System Preferences, go there again, select the drive and press “-“ to remove from the list. This will force Spotlight to reindex your drive.

View in context

Apps not recognised as installed by App Store or findable by Spotlight following Migration Assistant?

Similar questions