Stop ksfetch / Keystone Fetch / Google Software Updater Network Requests on Mac

If you notice this process which seems to make network requests quite often you may wonder what the heck it is.

Apparently it is a Google software updater process. To me it seems to run much too frequently. I prefer to check for updates when I want to, not constantly every hour or whatever their default interval is.

It’s possible to uninstall this process to rid your system of these constant network requests.

From the terminal you can run the following to uninstall this process for all users:

/Library/Google/GoogleSoftwareUpdate/GoogleSoftwareUpdate.bundle/Contents/Resources/GoogleSoftwareUpdateAgent.app/Contents/Resources/install.py --uninstall

If you get the message “No such file or directory” the file name may be “ksinstall”

/Library/Google/GoogleSoftwareUpdate/GoogleSoftwareUpdate.bundle/Contents/Resources/GoogleSoftwareUpdateAgent.app/Contents/Resources/ksinstall --uninstall

After running this command the network requests should stop. Hopefully the process is not automatically put back from a future update.

If you still see the network requests occurring you can also try setting the update interval to 0.
Run this command in terminal to disable checking for updates.

defaults write com.google.Keystone.Agent checkInterval 0

More information can be found in this stack overflow thread.
And another good write up about disabling the Google Software Updater.