How to see how long an app store app will take to download

Posted July 25th, 2011 in OSX

After starting the Apple Mac OSX Lion upgrade via the App Store on Saturday morning, I had no idea how long it was going to take to download on my slow broadband connection. Fortunately it's easy to find out how long an App Store app will take to download when you know how.

Dock Icon Progress

The dock icon progress bar isn't much help - it's little and the progress bar shows nothing but the progress, and it doens't move very fast for a big download:

Look under App Store -> Purchases

To find out how big the download is and the estimated time to download, open the App Store and click on the Purchases button as shown in the screenshot below:

This shows how much has been downloaded out of the total and an approximate amount of time remaining.

Should you need to pause the download for some reason during the download, simply click the "Pause" button. It will change to "Resume" which you can click at a later time to continue the download. You can even quit the App Store and halt your computer, resuming it at a later time.

How fast is the current download speed?

The App Store will show you how long it will take to download but not how fast it's currently downloading. If you want to know this, it can be found in the Activity Monitor under the Network tab as shown in the final screenshot: